Universals

William B. McGregor
Table of contents

One of the hallmarks of human language is diversity, which is present at all levels (phonetic, phonological, lexical, grammatical, semantic, pragmatic). Indeed, diversity might arguably be instated as a “design feature” of human language, alongside arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, productivity, rapid fade, interchangeability, etc. initially mooted by the American linguist Charles Hockett in an attempt to situate human language in an evolutionary context (Hockett 1960). Structural and functional variety and variation is a trait both within particular languages (as per Firth 1957: 29) and cross linguistically (as per Evans and Levinson 2009). The variation is however not without limits. The field of linguistic typology, broadly conceived, is concerned with discovering and explaining the extent of variation across languages and limitations on this variation (Comrie 1989: 33–34, 1994: 1). To capture this dual focus the field is sometimes referred to as (language/linguistic) universals and typology. Universals are those properties common to all (absolute) – or in a weakened sense (non-absolute), the majority of – human languages. Two types of universals are commonly distinguished in linguistic typology, non-implicational (possession of a feature) and implicational (where there is a relation of implication between two linguistic properties) – see further Comrie (1989: 17–18, 1994: 2).

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