Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 379
42 All languages have pronominal categories involving at least three persons and two
numbers.
43 If a language has gender categories in the noun, it has gender categories in the
pronoun.
44 If a language has gender distinctions in the first person, it always has gender
distinctions in the second or third person, or in both.
45 If there are gender distinctions in the plural of the pronoun, there are some gender
distinctions in the singular also.
Although some universals, such as ‘all languages have oral vowels’ are nonimplicational—they
specify that a certain property is found in all languages without
making reference to any other properties of language—it is evident from Greenberg’s list
that many other universals are implicational—they relate the presence of one property to
the presence of some other property in such a way that if one property is present, then the
other must also be present. Since for any two properties, p and q, it is logically possible
that both may be present, that p may be present while q is not, that neither may be
present, and that q may be present while p is not, we can see that an implicational
universal delimits the logically possible combinations of linguistic properties: they
specify that it is not the case that p can be present while q is not. It is only when all the
other three possibilities are in fact manifest in some language(s), that there is any point in
making an implicational universal claim. For instance, where p is ‘nasalized vowels’ and
q is ‘oral vowels’, the claim ‘if p then q’ is empty, because, since all languages have oral
vowels, the case where neither p nor q are manifest does not obtain. Therefore, the nonimplicational
universal ‘all languages have oral vowels’ together with the statement
‘nasalized vowels are possible’ render the implicational universal superfluous (Comrie,
1989, pp. 17–18).
Greenberg’s list reproduced above also illustrates another parameter, in addition to the
implicational/non-implicational parameter, along which universals may be classified,
namely the distinction between absolute universals, which are exceptionless, and
universal tendencies, to which there are exceptions (Comrie, 1989, p. 19):
This distinction is independent of that between implicational and nonimplicational
universals, giving over all a fourfold classification. There
are absolute non-implicational universals, such as: all languages have
vowels. There are absolute implicational universals, such as: if a language
has first/second person reflexives, then it has third person reflexives.
There are non-implicational tendencies, such as: nearly all languages have
nasal consonants (although some Salishan languages have no nasal
consonants). Finally, there are implicational tendencies, such as: if a
language has SOV basic word order, it will probably have post-positions
(but Persian, for instance, is SOV with prepositions).
In practice, given the constraints on research discussed above, it is often not possible to
establish for certain whether a universal is absolute or just a strong tendency (ibid., p.
20).
Hawkins (1988b, p. 5) defines a distributional or frequency universal as one which
states that languages of one type are more frequent than languages of another type.