Universal Morphology (UM)

Abstract

The theory of Universal Grammar (UG), usually credited to Noam Chomsky (1980), stipulates that if different human beings are brought up under normal conditions, then they will always develop a set of commonly- shared properties, conditions or whatever, distinguishing,  for example, nouns from verbs, or function words from content words. Previously, Greenberg (1963) developed a set of forty five linguistic universals after exploring thirty languages. These language universals covered grammar, syntax and morphology.  Michael Tomasello (2003) held out that with the passing of time, human species evolved a genetically universal grammar common to all peoples and that the variability in modern languages is basically on the surface only. Syntacticians and other researchers hold the belief that the idea of a universal grammar can be traced back to Roger Bacon's observations in his 1245 overview that all languages are built upon a common grammar (Westtacott, 1955).

Similarly, yet not typically, this research paper proposes a hypothesis that human beings have a default set of forming vocabulary. The study explores ways of forming words in four languages, namely English, Arabic, Tamil and Hausa. Since these languages belong to entirely different language families, then pinpointing any similarities in forming words constitute valuable evidence on the validity of the theory.