Linguistic universal

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A linguistic universal is a statement that is true for all languages. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs. or All spoken languages have consonants and vowels (but not sign languages, to which phonological universals have no relevance). Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to linguistic typology, and intends to reveal information about how the human brain processes language.

The field was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph H. Greenberg, who from a set of some thirty languages derived a set of basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax.

Linguists distinguish between two kinds of universals: absolute and implicational. An absolute universal applies to every known language and are quite few in number; an example would be All languages have pronouns. An implicational universal applies to languages which have a particular feature that is always accompanied by another feature, such as If a language has trial grammatical number, it also must have dual grammatical number.

Also in contrast to absolute universals are tendencies, statements that may not be true for all languages, but nevertheless are far too common to be the result of chance. They also have implicational and non-implicational forms. An example of the latter would be The vast majority of languages have nasal consonants. However, most tendencies, like their universal counterparts, are implicational. For example, If a language has Subject Object Verb word order, it is overwhelmingly likely that that language will use postpositions and not prepositions. Strictly speaking, a tendency is not a kind of universal, but exceptions to most statements called universals can be found. Often it turns out that these exceptional languages are undergoing a shift from one type of language to another.

da:Typologi og universalier