Some aspects of human language seem to be universal, holding true for every lanuniversal guage, or are statistical universals, holding true for most languages. Many universals arise from the functional role of language as a communicative system by humans. Every language, for example, seems to have words for referring to people, for talking about eating and drinking, for being polite or not. There are also structural linguistic universals; for example, every language seems to have nouns and verbs (Chapter 8), has ways to ask questions, or issue commands, linguistic mechanisms for indicating agreement or disagreement.