Also in contrast to absolute universals are tendencies, statements that may not be true for all languages but nevertheless are far too common to be the result of chance.
He argues that "theoretical categories, and their inter-relations construe an abstract model of language...; they are interlocking and mutually defining".
[4] Noam Chomsky's work related to the innateness hypothesis as it pertains to our ability to rapidly learn any language without formal instruction and with limited input, or what he refers to as a poverty of the stimulus, is what began research into linguistic universals.
Chomsky defines UG as "the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages... by necessity.
The discussion of Chomsky's UG, its innateness, and its connection to how humans learn language has been one of the more covered topics in linguistics studies to date.
However, there is division amongst linguists between those who support Chomsky's claims of UG and those who argued against the existence of an underlying shared grammar structure that can account for all languages.
Some linguists, starting with Gottfried Leibniz, have pursued the search for a hypothetic irreducible semantic core of all languages.
A modern variant of this approach can be found in the natural semantic metalanguage of Anna Wierzbicka and associates.
On the basis of such data it has been argued that the highest level in the partonomy of body part terms would be the word for 'person'.
[10] 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.
With regards to Chomsky's universal grammar, these linguists claim that the explanation of the structure and rules applied to UG are either false due to a lack of detail into the various constructions used when creating or interpreting a grammatical sentence, or that the theory is unfalsifiable due to the vague and oversimplified assertions made by Chomsky.
Their article promotes linguistic diversity by citing multiple examples of variation in how "languages can be structured at every level: phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic.