:: It's pretty much a linguistic universal that body parts are used for geographical and direction descriptions such as " foot of the mountain " . ( In Slavic, the cognate word for foot, " pid ", in my family's dialect, means beneath ) Such terms are common with the indigenous peoples of Siberia.
22.
The group has played a pioneering role in developing the field of semantic typology and new models of language documentation . [ http : / / fieldmanuals . mpi . nl / In 2009, Levinson co-wrote ( with Nicholas Evans ) a hotly debated article contesting the existence of non-trivial linguistic universals and arguing that linguistic diversity is a crucial datum for cognitive science.
23.
Linguists have been interested in home sign for the insights it offers into the uniquely human ability to generate, acquire, and process language in general, and particularly as it pertains to such topics as the origins of language, notions of linguistic universals, the hypothesized critical period for language acquisition, children's natural tendency to invent language ( language acquisition device ), and the relationship between gesture and language.
24.
Michael Halliday has argued for a distinction between "'descriptive "'and "'theoretical "'categories in resolving the matter of the existence of linguistic universals, a distinction he takes from J . R . Firth and Louis Hjelmslev . He argues that " theoretical categories, and their inter-relations construe an abstract model of language . . .; they are interlocking and mutually defining ".
