Language universals

1. Underlying the multitude of idiosyncrasies of the world's languages there are uniformities of universal scope. Amid infinite diversity, all languages are cut from the same pattern. Language universals are by their very nature summary statements about characteristics of tendencies shared by all human speakers. As such they constitute the most general laws of a science of linguistics (as contrasted with a method and a set of specific descriptive results). Further, since language is at once both an aspect of individual behaviour and an aspect of human culture, its universals provide both the major point of contact with underlying psychological principles (psycholinguistics) and the major source of implications for human culture in general (ethnolinguistics).

2. Types of universals may be differentiated both with respect to logical structure and with respect to substantive content. On the basis of logical structure, the subtypes which may be distinguished include:

(a) Unrestricted universals: characteristics possessed by all languages which are not merely definitional, namely they are such that if a symbolic system did not possess them, it would still be called a language.

(b) Universal implications: asserting that if a language has a certain characteristic, it must also have some other characteristic, but not vice versa.

(c) Restricted equivalence: asserting that if a language has a particular non-universal characteristic, it also has another defined characteristic, and vice versa.

(d) Statistical universals: asserting that for any language a certain characteristic has a greater probability of occurrence than some other.

(e) Statistical correlations: asserting that if a language has a particular characteristic, it has a significantly greater probability of possessing some other characteristic.

(f) Universal frequency distributions, whereby, as a result of some measurement over an adequate sample of languages, a characteristic mean and standard deviation is demonstrated and may therefore be considered as universal facts about languages.

3. On the basis of substantive content, the subtypes which may be distinguished include: phonological, grammatical, semantic and symbolic. In this classification, the first three involve either form without meaning or meaning without form, whereas the last, which involves sound symbolism, involves the connection between the two.