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Distributional universals include ‘the more similar the position of syntactic heads across
phrasal categories, the more languages there are’ and ‘languages without self-embedded
relative clauses are more frequent than those with’ (Hawkins, 1988b, p. 5).
Linguists working in the Greenbergian tradition allow for variation in the explanation
of the existence of the universals which they isolate: it is considered possible that some
universals may require one type of explanation, while others may require explanation of
another kind. For instance, some universals, such as the fact that all languages have at
least three persons and two numbers may be explained from the point of view of
discourse pragmatics: they facilitate communication because they allow speakers to make
referential distinctions which make communication more efficient (Hawkins, 1988b, p.
11). Comrie (1989, p. 28) proposes a similar explanation of the fact that the existence of
first-or second-person reflexive forms in a language implies the existence of third-person
reflexive forms:
For each of the first and second persons, there is hardly ever ambiguity in
a given context whether different instances of the corresponding pronoun
are coreferential or not: in a given sentence, all instances of I are
coreferential, as are usually all instances of we and all instances of you. In
the third person, however, there is potentially a vast number of referents.
Some languages say I hit myself and some say I hit me, but it is not
possible to have both interpreted literally with a semantic difference of
coreference. But if a language has both he hit himself and he hit him as
possible sentences, then a semantically important distinction of
coreference versus non-coreference can be made. Thus reflexivity is
simply more important in the third person than in the first or second
persons, and this is reflected in the implicational universal.
Other universals may be explained as resulting from constraints which one part of
grammar imposes on other parts, or from constraints imposed by the level of meaning on
the level of form. Keenan (1979; see also 1987) argues for a Meaning-Form
Dependency Principle (MFDP), also known as the Functional Dependency Principle,
which explains why, if in a language there is morphological agreement between, say,
nouns and adjectives in, for instance, number and gender, it is always the adjective that
agrees with the noun. He argues that this agreement restriction in the morphology arises
from a semantic restriction which tends to cause any function category, such as adjective,
to change its interpretation to accord with that of its argument, for instance a noun, while
the interpretation of the noun is typically invariant with different modifying adjectives.
For instance, flat has a different interpretation in flat tyre; flat beer; and flat road,
whereas road has the same interpretation in flat road; dusty road and windy road
(Hawkins, 1988b, pp. 8–9). The MFDP thus explains (p. 9) ‘a strong form of internal
consistency within the grammar: a dependency in form…mirrors a dependency in
meaning. That is, a universal morphological dependency follows from a semantic
dependency’.
Some language universals may be explained by reference to the processing demands
placed on language users by, for instance, memory constraints and by the relative ease or
difficulty involved in processing certain structures in comprehension and production. For