Major advantages of IL may be seen in ( i ) the fact that it was developed in view of the full spectrum of linguistic diversity from the outset, ( ii ) its integration of all levels of linguistic description ( from phonetics to sentence semantics ) within a unified theoretical framework, ( iii ) its inclusion of both system-based and non-system-based properties of languages, ( iv ) its development both of a theory of language and a theory of linguistic descriptions, and ( v ) the ontological explicitness and consistency of all its theories, making it a framework suitable for the description of individual languages as well as for contrastive linguistics, linguistic typology and universals research.
