Universal

Revision as of 20:16, 19 September 2012

The UNL is supposed to be a universal language, but the adjective "universal" must be understood, in the UNL framework, in terms of "semantic accessibility", i.e., as the capability of being used and understood by all. That is the use that one may observe in "universal adapter", "universal screwdriver", "universal remote control", and so on. This does not mean, obviously, that UNL is a sort of super-language adapted to various purposes, forms and operations; it only means that the UNL is not bound to a "particular" language, and may be used to represent information in a way that it can be processed independently of the source language or the target language.

The idea of "universality" in UNL is thus strictly related to the notions of "explicitness", "self-sufficiency" or "language-independence". In order to be universal, the UNL has to be neutral, because a constructed language cannot be semantically accessible if it is bound to any particular language. In the UNL framework, this semantic neutrality is associated to the idea of closed system, as defined in structural linguistics, i.e., as a system of interdependent entities, where the value of a sign is determined by all the other signs in the same system. In order to be self-sufficient, the UNL must work only through relations of difference, either syntagmatic and paradigmatic, which place signs in opposition to one another, delimiting their meaning and possible range of use.

For the time being, this semantic neutrality is still a desideratum. The current UNL is still language-biased and depends intensively on implicit knowledge. But this is an long-standing ongoing initiative, and we do hope that eventually we will come up with a formalism that would be progressively more tailored to represent information in a less-marked way.

because we understand that 

The universality of UNL is expressed in the set of Universal Words, universal relations and universal attributes.