Universal components

As research on languages proceeds, the metalinguistic features of meaning mentioned above would form a growing stock of elements for semantic description, much as the stock of phonetic features can be used to describe different languages. The cross-linguistic validity of such semantic elements is based on the prima facie intertranslatability of languages to a significant degree. Their validity as part of a larger semantic metatheory would be supported by the ability to account for the observable evidence of bilinguals’ responses with respect to cross-linguistic similarities and differences. Such possibly universal elements would be variously combined as components in the definitions of items in different languages and be supplemented with components specific to each language.