ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some influential cognitively oriented studies that demonstrate that languages can exhibit a radically different conceptual organisation and structure. Linguists of any theoretical persuasion are intrigued by the possible existence of linguistic universals, by the form of such universals and by the nature of the relationship between thought and language. The chapter compares the cognitive and formal positions on linguistic universals. It looks at the issue of universals from a formal perspective. There are two prominent formal approaches that address this issue: first, the Universal Grammar hypothesis, which relates to grammatical structure; and second, the semantic decomposition approach(es), which relates to semantic structure. The predominant formal approach to semantic universals assumes semantic primes or primitives and is known as the semantic decomposition or componential analysis approach. Although cognitive linguistics makes the case for a common conceptualising capacity, accounting for general cross-linguistic patterns, such a position is nevertheless consistent with and even predicts substantial cross-linguistic variation.
