4. PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE:

The properties which all languages share can be referred to as universal grammar (UG),which form the basis of all posible human languages.

These humans properties may be partly due to human experience.Experience itself is not enough since animals raised around people learn extremely little human language.

When did humans start talking?

There are many theories about when and how humans started to develop language. Some scientists think that all human languages arose from a common language spoken by our ancestors in Africa. There are over 5000 different languages in the world today, although some of these are nearly extinct.

Human language probably started to develop around 100,000 years ago.

Since ancient Greeks, languages tend to be gramatically organized. Language has the important property that it organizes elements into structures.

This aspect was considered important after 1957 with Chomsky´s publication of Sintactic Structures, which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English.