Talk:Linguistic universal

message: What are the (syntactic) universals in which Chomsky believes? I was very interested in this topic, since Chomsky is very interested in the order of words. Are there universals concerning the order of words in a sentence? I am sure Chomsky looked for them. There are languages in which the order of words is almost completely free, such as Latin, in which if you re-combine the words of a sentence in any order you want, you get the same sentence (with the same meaning). [User: laurian]]]:I believe that Chomsky has changed his mind on this, and regarding completely free languages (i.e. generally languages with case systems), another one being Warlpiri language it is thought that they have an underlying word order, and that phrases that stray from this word order are "marked". e.g. even in English you can have "the dog was eaten by the cat" (passivisation) and "the dog, the cat ate" (topicalisation)...
:From :
::Chomsky’s position has changed with respect to whether UG should capture typological variation in word order:
::Insofar as attention is restricted to surface structures, the most that can be expected is the discovery of statistical tendencies, such as those presented by Greenberg 1963. (Chomsky 1965: 118; emphasis added)
::There has also been very productive study of generalizations that are more directly observable: generalizations about the word orders we actually see, for example. The work of Joseph Greenberg has been particularly instructive and influential in this regard. These universals are probably descriptive generalizations that should be derived from principles of UG. (Chomsky 1998: 33; emphasis added)
:- FrancisTyers 13:41, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I'm aware Chomsky's always thought that UG ought to capture typological variations in word order, though the appropriate technical devices for doing so have of course been debated. On the other hand, he did suggest in Aspects that some free word order phenomena might result from a general principle that stylistic reordering is permitted up to ambiguity, so I guess you might argue that such a principle wouldn't be part of UG. Cadr 10:29, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Syntactic universals

message: Is the terminology section really correct? It seems to be at least misleading. To my knowledge one distinguishes between absolute and statistical universals (the latter ones are often called tendencies). While absolute universals apply "universally", tendencies may have exceptions. While the terminology basically states exactly what I've just written, the first sentence also implies that the opposite of an absolute universal is an implicational universal. This is not correct. If a language universal is implicational or non-implicational has nothing to do with it being absolute or statistical.
I reverted the last edit and add a little clarification. Some clean-up to bring the second paragraph in line with the first one is still needed. 130.123.225.69 22:41, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Aye you're right - FrancisTyers 23:32, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Terminology

message: :"All languages have pronouns."
Except for ones that don't have them as a separate grammatical category, like Japanese, where there are some nouns which function kinda like pronouns, but not quite.
Don't we have a better example. Taw 18:06, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Are there actually any linguistic "universals" without counterexamples? Geoffrey Sampson in "Educating Eve" claims there are none except "all languages have nouns and verbs", and that even that one is dubious. This strikes me as a bold claim, but I've never seen it refuted. So is there such an example? rspeer 05:21, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a controversy among Mande linguists concerning the noun-verb distinction. It started with Maurice Delafosse insisting on l'indistinction foncière du nom et du verbe (as cited in Manessy 1962:57). The issue is roughly that in Mande languages, you can use all 'verbs' without any morphological derivation as 'nouns'. Linguists who have tried to solve this problem by conflating the noun and verb categories at some theoretical level include Manessy (1962) for Mande in general, Creissels (1983) for Mandinka, Kastenholz (1987) for Koranko and Blecke for Tigemaxo, one of the Bozo languages. — mark ✎ 07:56, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, you've just made Sampson's claim stronger. But my question went the other way. Are there any linguistic universals that actually are universal? rspeer 15:13, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't know of any absolute universals with no counterexamples. However, even though nouns and verbs can blend into each other and other word classes in some languages, they are certainly present in some form in all languages. Language is there to describe events and objects around us, so  there necessarily are words to describe events and objects. Still, this is no proof that they are built into our brain. (They could be, but this is not a proof for it.) It may simply be something reality imposes on us. I have yet to see even a computer language that someone managed to create without nouns (classes, objects, variables) or verbs (events, functions, commands). Mlewan 11:13, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I think the open front unrounded vowel is the most common vowel sound worldwide, most languages that lacks it has an open back unrounded vowel, as far as I understand it. 惑乱 分からん 10:38, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronouns 

message: This link has died:
* Penn state University course page on Linguistic universal
I'll check to see if there's a newer one. RJCraig 17:03, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: Several languages, for example Tidore and Kuuk Thaayorre, lack a general term meaning 'body'.
I think that's a lot more common. My dialect of German doesn't have such a word either, for simple lack of need. One would think that the presence of Standard German, which has two such terms, is the reason for this, but I can't think of a situation where I'd need to talk about a body (and would borrow one of the Standard German terms)...
David Marjanović |  email adress masked | 00:26 CEST | 2006/10/28
:(I masked your email adress, the bots are just too clever these days.) Which dialect of German is that, if I may ask? As for the question how common this pattern is, as far as I know there are no statistics on this. Tidore and Kuuk Thaayorre differ from your situation in that there isn't some 'standard dialect' which does have a word for "body". I find it interesting that you can't think of a sitation where you'd need to talk about the body. If you think about the burial of a deceased person,  do you feel the person as a whole is buried, or only his body? How would you describe your understanding of the English word body? And the Standard German Körper, for that matter? — mark ✎ 08:01, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word for "body" 

message: Where can we find a list of those universals? Where is, for instance, Greenberg's list? Or it can not be used in Wikipedia due to copyrights? Alone Coder (talk) 07:10, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where is the list of them? 

message: I'd like to point out that not only are typical studies extremely far from even making claimed universals believable, but to prove a true universal is absolutely impossible in the absence of complete and absolutely perfect records and analyses (nevermind that even analyses can differ and that even seemingly simple questions such as how many vowel phonemes a language has can be hotly contested – do Circassian and Abkhaz really have less than three vowel phonemes, and – a notoriously thorny problem – how to analyse Nuxalk in terms of syllable division?) of every speech form ever spoken by any group of humans (and even then you'd run into problems of definition – where is the temporal cut-off for "human"? Does Neanderthal speech count? What about future languages? Hypothetical future human–animal/alien/robot/whatever hybrids? etc.), as there can always be an exotic language that is documented but which you missed, or a language that is undocumented (or the feature in question could happen to be undocumented, even though it exists, or used to exist, but possibly only extremely marginally) or even a dialect that may be documented or not which may be a counterexample, and the speech form in question could be anything from vigorous over moribund over recently extinct to long extinct. There are so many possibilities, and so many possible counter-examples. How do you go about proving that something you claim has no exceptions if there is no way you can examine all the examples and even if you could, you cannot even tell if a possible counterexample even counts due to unclear definitions and demarcation problems?
It seems to me that most (possibly all) universal-hunters have no concept of how bold and problematic and how hard to demonstrate a claim of universality really is. They don't even bother to define what they mean by "universal", which means it remains unclear what a possible counter-example would even look like. They do not even recognise the methodical problems involved. And that, I dare say, is the kiss of death to any claim you may wish to make to being scientific. I laugh at any study whose sample consists of 10 languages, half of which are major written, standardised Indo-European languages traditionally spoken in Europe. This study (whose topic is so amusing it's almost igNobel-worthy), for instance, cites 31 languages but examines only 10 in detail: Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Icelandic, Russian, Mandarin, Lao, Siwu, Cha'palaa, and Murrinh-Patha. This sample is not even representative either typologically, areally or genetically; very far from it. Moreover, it encompasses far fewer than 1% of all languages currently spoken in the world, regardless of how you count or estimate that number. Arguably even vastly fewer.
To conclude, the presumption that you could ever prove a true universal in any meaningful sense, as opposed to just tendencies (however strong), is pure hybris and vastly underrates the difficulty of the task. Universals cannot be proved, they can only be disproved; willing or unwilling, Rara and Rarissima are the worst nemesis of the universal-hunter, and can be said to even put the nail in the coffin for the universal-hunting endeavour. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:53, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: These seem all reasonable points. By the way, on this 'universal syllable', there is an FAQ which appears to cover some of the points you're raising here. http://huh.ideophone.org/frequently-asked-questions/ Louise C. Harrison (talk) 12:45, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Impossibility to prove universals 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The part on UG contains "UG allow humans to interpret and create infinite novel grammatical sentences." This claim is wrong. The assumption is that languages are infinite sets of sentences. But the sentences themselves are all finite. There is no infinite sentence in the Chomskyan world. You may read up on this in Section 13.1.8. of my Grammatical theory text book. See also page 4 footnote 1. StefanMülller (talk) 09:18, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infinitude claims