Defining Language Universals

by: Bianca Singer

WS 04/05

Table of contents

1 INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS 2

2 EXPLANATIONS FOR THEIR EXISTENCE  3

3 DIFFERENT TYPES OF UNIVERSAL 5

3.1 ABSOLUTE AND NONABSOLUTE UNIVERSALS  5
3.2 IMPLICATIONAL AND NONIMPLICATIONAL UNIVERSALS  7

4 DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO UNIVERSALS  12

4.1 GREENBERG  12

4.1.1 Concepts of Dominance and Harmony  13

4.2 HAWKINS  14

4.2.1 Concepts of heaviness and mobility  15

4.3 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHOMSKY AND GREENBERG 18

4.3.1 The data base  19
4.3.2 Abstractness  21
4.3.3 Explanations for Universals 22

5 CONCLUSION 23

6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 25

1 Introduction to language universals

Language is something uniquely human. Bertrand Russell stated in 1948 that “A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor” (Whaley 1997: 4). Language ist not only unique to humans and diverse but there are also commonalities between languages. About five thousand languages are spoken in the world today but there still is a basic unity that undelies their diversities. Many of the world’s languages show similar principles. An example of such a similaritiy is word order. In some languages such as English, French and Italian the word order is subject, verb and object. This is the so called SOV order.

Besides similarities like this, there also exist features between some languages, which are common to all human languages in the world and are called language universals. These language universals classify entire languages into categories which are then based on shared properties. Language universals are examined within the field of typology. Typology has the task of examining cross-linguistic patterns. This means that “all typological research is based on comparisons between languages” (Whaley 1997: 7). Through comparing different languages with each other, one necessarily comes into contact with universals, which hold true for a group of languages or even for all languages. This is how language universals are placed within the field of typology. This paper starts with defining what language universals are and why they exist. In the main body it introduces different approaches to universals by different linguists, namely Greenberg, Hawkins and Chomsky. The approaches of Greenberg and Chomsky will be contrasted with each other. The comparison mainly focuses on the ideas of Bernard Comrie.

2 Explanations for their existence

In Comrie’s book Language universals and linguistic typology one can find three approaches to explaining universals. These are namely the monogenesis, the innateness including other psychological explanations and the functional and pragmatic explanations.

The term monogenesis means that there is a genetic origin which holds true for all languages of the world. The hypothesis is that there once existed and ancestor language from which all the languages of the world developed. This would also implicate that each of the universals have been part of the ancestor language and that they have passed on through all the stages the language went through. This would mean that every universal has to be present in all of today’s languages. But what happens with universals that have a precondition, like implicational universals do? Implicational universals will be explained in detail in the next chapter under 3.2. Another question arises from this hypothesis: How are the different groups of languages explained which were not in contact with each other all through the development of languages? Besides that, there are fundamental differences between languages of today. How does this hypothesis account for these? There is no proof or disproof of this thesis since there is no possibility to recover this one ancestor language. From this we already can conclude that such an explanation cannot be viable. The next approach to consider is the one of the innateness and other psychological explanations. Innateness was favoured by Chomsky. He referred to it as the Universal Grammar, which enables the child to learn a language in such a short period as 4 or 5 years. But it is not a satisfying explanation for the universals since it is just a name and it cannot be proven. Comrie states that:

Advocates of innateness are simply arguing that in the absence of any alternative coherent explanation for language universals, innateness is the only possibility they can think of. Instead of serving to deepen our understanding of language universals, the absence of any possibility of testing innateness as an explanation serves rather to divert researchers from considering alternatives that my be testable. (Comrie 1981: 24)

The last approach is the one of the functional and pragmatic explanations. The argument concerning this approach is that through certain universals language becomes more functional. This contradicts the numerous instances where language seems to be dysfunctional. “The existence of synonyms seems to be a needless luxury, and even more clearly the existence of homonyms…” (Comrie 1981: 25). Still, universals may have something to do with making a language more functional since for example a functional language with only homophons is hard to imagine. Some strategies to reduce such dysfunctional elements must play a role and these strategies might lead to explanations for language universals. The functional point of view is that a language universal makes it easier to recover the semantic content from the syntactic structure.

So far it has been discussed why language universals exist and three approaches to their explanation, given by Comrie, were laid out. The next chapter will define the different types of universals. The categorization of language universals will go along with the one proposed by Lindsay Whaley except for the term nonabsolute universals which is replaced by the term tendency as Comrie calls these universals.

3 Different types of universal

3.1 Absolute and nonabsolute universals

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