ABSTRACT
The study of language universals is the study of those properties that are necessarily common to all human languages. It is important to understand that by claiming that a particular property is a language universal. This chapter tries and demonstrates that both kinds of explanations of language universals, the formal and the functional, are essential if we are to gain an overall understanding of the motivations underlying the existence of language universals. The chapter argues two different kinds of explanations must be entertained for the existence of language universals. First, some language universals reflect inbuilt constraints on human beings, in particular on their cognitive capacities; for such universals, we can essentially only say that language is the way it is because people are the way they are-though of course the question remains open why people are the way they are.
