Linguistic Universals and Their Relevance to Tesol

The more we learn about language, the more ignorant we find we are. The transformational explosion in the past decade has generated an incredible amount of research into English exceeding both in quantity and quality that of any two earlier decades. But the result has been to make grammarians uneasily aware of vast quantities of facts, generalizations, properties, rules which cannot easily be subsumed within any neat grammatical framework. So the apparently glib mention of in the title of this paper may seem somewhat presumptuous. Perhaps I should have used the term linguistic tendencies. But since all the evidence is never in and since exceptions are hard if not impossible to find for the ones I shall discuss, the term does not seem too risky. The two fairly secure universals discussed here may appear rather obvious, but their consequences have been little explored or exploited in the teaching of English as second language. The discussion involves considerable use of meaning not only as route for determining deep structure but as being almost if not completely identical to deep structure. That is, and syntax are treated as fundamentally interdependent. Chomsky's early claim that grammar is best formulated as a self-contained study independent of semantics now appears more of holdover from the heydays of structural linguistics than useful tenet underlying present work in transformational linguistics. McCawley 1 has claimed that selectional restrictions have little or no independent status in linguistics. These seem to be semantic constraints on the set of possible messages. Thus it is pointless to claim that paranoid who says

Linguistic universal · Linguistics · Political science · Problem of universals · Relevance (law) · Sociology · Theoretical linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology

• Semantic Universals in Instructional Materials

  Frances M Aid•TESOL Quarterly•1974

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