There is a common agreement that disfluencies are accompanied by important modifications both at the segmental and prosodic levels and that speakers and listeners use such cues systematically and meaningfully. Thus they appear as linguistic universal devices that are similar to other devices and are controlled by the speaker and regulated by language specific constraints. In addition, speech disfluencies such as fillers can help listeners to identify upcoming words. While formulaic language can serve as a useful cue that more is to come, some people do develop an unconscious dependence on these filler words.
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In opposition to the postulated linguistic universal regarding the primacy of the visual domain in the hierarchy of the verbs of perception, Khwe's most widely applied verb of perception is ǁám̀, 'taste, smell, touch'. Khwe has three verbs of perception, the other two being mṹũ 'see', and kóḿ 'hear', but ǁám̀, which is semantically rooted in oral perception, is used to convey holistic modes of sensory perception. The Khwe term xǀóa functions both as a verb 'to be little, few, some' and as an alternative way of expressing the quantity 'three'. This term is unique in its ambiguity among numeral terms used by African hunter-gatherer subsistence communities.
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A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages.
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The specialized sense of "sin" is usually limited to Daoist usage, except for the Chinese "synonym compound" zuiguo(r) 罪過(兒) "fault; wicked act; sin; offense", which is a humble expression for "guilty conscience; this is really more than I deserve." Words meaning "sin; violation of religious law" are not a linguistic universal. For instance, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, who studied the Gondi language, said, "There are no words in Gondi for sin or virtue: a man may be ruined, here and hereafter, for a breach of a taboo, but the notion of retribution for sinners is an alien importation" . The Gondi language word pap "sin" is a loanword from the Marathi language.
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In linguistics, singulative number and collective number (abbreviated and ) are terms used when the grammatical number for multiple items is the unmarked form of a noun, and the noun is specially marked to indicate a single item. When a language using a collective-singulative system does mark plural number overtly, that form is called the plurative. This is the opposite of the more common singular–plural pattern, where a noun is unmarked when it represents one item, and is marked to represent more than one item. Greenberg's linguistic universal #35 states that no language is purely singulative- collective in the sense that plural is always the null morpheme and singular is not.
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Some other examples of proposed linguistic universals in semantics include the idea that all languages possess words with the meaning '(biological) mother' and 'you (second person singular pronoun)' as well as statistical tendencies of meanings of basic color terms in relation to the number of color terms used by a respective language. Though words in any given language may be polysemous, that a single word may possess multiple meanings, there appears to be at least one word in every language that has the meaning of '(biological) mother' and 'you (second person singular pronoun)'. For colors, there exists a pattern of an implication linguistic universal in relation to the various meanings of basic color terms with respect to the total number of words describing color. For example, if a languages possesses only two terms for describing color, their respective meanings will be 'black' and 'white' (or perhaps 'dark' and 'light').
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