Identifying Linguistic Universals

What is a Linguistic Universal?

A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages. Some are thought to be true for every single language, while others are strong tendencies. To get a handle on the key concepts, let's start with a foundational reading.

As you've just read, universals aren't all-or-nothing. Here's a quick summary:

• Absolute Universals: These are properties claimed to exist in all languages. A classic example is: "All languages have nouns and verbs." These are quite rare.
• Statistical Universals (Tendencies): These are features that are overwhelmingly common but have known exceptions. For example, the vast majority of languages have nasal consonants (like /m/ and /n/), but a few do not.
• Implicational Universals: These are "if-then" statements connecting two properties. They are powerful because they reveal hidden dependencies in language structure. A famous example we'll explore is: "If a language has a VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) basic word order, then it will use prepositions, not postpositions."
• Non-Implicational Universals: These simply state the existence of a feature, like "All languages have pronouns."

Understanding these distinctions is key, because much of the work in this area involves uncovering these "if-then" relationships and statistical tendencies.

Syntactic Universals: The Order of Things

One of the most well-studied areas of linguistic universals is syntax, specifically the order of the core elements of a sentence: the Subject (S), Verb (V), and Object (O).

Logically, there are six possible ways to order these three elements:

1. SOV (e.g., Japanese: Watashi wa pan o taberu / I TOPIC bread OBJ eat)
2. SVO (e.g., English: I eat bread)
3. VSO (e.g., Welsh: Bwytaodd Siôn fara / Ate John bread)
4. VOS (e.g., Malagasy)
5. OVS (e.g., Hixkaryana)
6. OSV (e.g., Nadëb)

Are these orders equally common? Take a look at the data in this table and on the world map.

The data is clear: SVO and SOV dominate, accounting for nearly 90% of the world's languages. This leads to a powerful statistical universal, first formulated by Joseph Greenberg:

Universal 1: In declarative sentences with a nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object.

Why should this be? The following video offers some compelling cognitive explanations.

Implicational Universals in Word Order

The patterns get even more interesting when we look at implicational universals. As mentioned earlier, there's a strong correlation between the order of the verb and object, and the choice between prepositions (like in, on, with) and postpositions (which follow the noun).

Let's dig into this using a foundational text on the topic.

This reveals a deeper principle of "structural harmony." Languages tend to be consistently head-initial or head-final. The "head" is the core word of a phrase.

• In a prepositional phrase like "in the house," the preposition in is the head, and it comes first. This is head-initial.
• In Japanese, you say ie no naka ni (house of inside in), which is equivalent to "in the house." The particles no and ni are postpositions; they come after the noun. This is head-final.

The tendency is:

• SVO & VSO languages are overwhelmingly head-initial and use prepositions.
• SOV languages are overwhelmingly head-final and use postpositions.

Beyond Syntax: Universals in Morphology and Semantics

These universal patterns aren't confined to sentence structure. They appear in the structure of words (morphology) and meaning (semantics) as well.

• Morphological Universal: Consider how we build complex words. A very strong universal (Greenberg's Universal 28) states that if a word has both derivational and inflectional affixes, the derivational affix is always closer to the root.

  • Derivational affixes create new words (e.g., teach -> teach*-er*).
  • Inflectional affixes add grammatical information (e.g., teacher -> teacher*-s*).
  • The order is always ROOT-DERIVATION-INFLECTION (teach-er-s), never ROOT-INFLECTION-DERIVATION (teach-s-er). This holds true across countless languages.

• Semantic Universal: A fascinating example comes from color terms. Linguists Berlin and Kay found that languages don't develop color words randomly. There is a universal hierarchy.

  • If a language has 2 terms, they are black & white (or dark & light).
  • If it has 3, the third is red.
  • If it has 4, the next is green or yellow.
  • If it has 5, the next is both green and yellow.
  • If it has 6, the next is blue.
  • The next is brown, followed by purple, pink, orange, or grey.

This suggests that the way we perceive and categorize the world isn't arbitrary, but follows patterns rooted in our shared biology and cognition.

The Big Debate: Is There a "Universal Grammar"?

The existence of universals led linguist Noam Chomsky to propose his famous theory of Universal Grammar (UG). The idea is that humans are born with an innate "language faculty"—a kind of genetic blueprint containing the fundamental principles of all languages. Variation arises because this blueprint has "switches" (parameters) that are set differently by exposure to a specific language.

In recent years, Chomsky refined this to the idea that the one true universal, the unique cognitive ability for language, is recursion.

As the video explains, recursion is the ability to embed a phrase inside another phrase of the same type, creating potentially infinite structures. For example:

• This is the house.
• This is the house [that Jack built]. (A sentence embedded in a noun phrase)
• This is the cat [that chased the rat [that lived in the house [that Jack built]]].

The claim by linguist Daniel Everett that the Pirahã language of the Amazon lacks recursion struck at the very heart of Chomsky's theory. If even one language exists without recursion, it cannot be an absolute universal, and the foundation of modern UG is shaken. This debate is still active today and shows that the search for universals is a dynamic and contentious part of linguistics.

Conclusion

Today we've journeyed from the diversity of language to its underlying unity. We've seen that despite surface-level differences, languages are constrained by a set of shared principles, or universals.

Key takeaways:

• Linguistic universals are patterns that appear across a large number of languages. They can be absolute, statistical, or implicational.
• In syntax, there are strong tendencies for word order. Most languages are SOV or SVO, with the subject preceding the object. Implicational universals link features like basic word order to the use of prepositions or postpositions.
• In morphology, the ordering of affixes follows universal rules, such as derivational morphemes being closer to the root than inflectional ones.
• In semantics, concepts like color terms appear to develop along a universal, hierarchical path.
• The search for universals is tied to major theories like Chomsky's Universal Grammar, and the potential universality of features like recursion is a subject of intense scientific debate.

A Look Ahead:

So far in this course, we've dealt with language as an abstract system—its rules, varieties, and universal properties. In our next module, we're going to get physical. We will begin our study of Phonetics, the science of speech sounds. Our first lesson will focus on how we use our mouth, tongue, and lungs to produce the fundamental building blocks of speech: consonants.