Global agreements
Many linguistics scholars regard the world's languages as being fundamentally similar. Yes, the characters, words, and rules vary. But underneath it all, enough similar structures exist to form what MIT scholars call universal grammar, a capacity for language that all humans share. To see how linguists find similariites that can elude the rest of us, consider a language operation called "allocutive agreement." This is a variation of standard subject-verb agreement. Normally, a verb ending simply agrees with the subject of a sentence, so that in English we say, “You go,” but also, “She goes.” Allocutive agreement throws a twist into this procedure: Even a third-person verb ending, such as “she goes,” changes depending on the social status of the person being spoken to. This happens in Basque, for one. It also occurs in Japanese, says MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, even though Japanese has long been thought not to deploy agreement at all....