ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to answer the question: ‘Are there universals in translation’, and looks at the long history of discussions of language universals. Universals have a long and venerable tradition in the philosophy of language. Universals have been equated with those features of language that are part of a human being’s genetic endowment. Early comparative language scholars and the followers of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ignored the quest for universals for a while, giving priority to the seemingly infinite diversity of languages in their surface structures. The universals posited in the functional approach are used to represent bottom-up generalizations across languages. The interpersonal function is a mode of enacting personal relationships of different kinds, exchanges of speech roles, realizing discourse functions, questions, commands, offers, etc. implying systems and resources of mood and modality.
