An Encyclopaedia of Language_04

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An Encyclopaedia of Language_04 AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 165 As Hockett (1963:3) points out, statistical universals are no less important than unrestricted universals. One fundamentalassumption of language universals research has to be the assumption that the actually occurring human languages arerepresentative qualitatively and quantitatively of what is possible in human language. On the other hand, it is dangerous inmany cases to assume that because a particular property has not been observed in an actually occurring human language, thenit is in principle impossible. Many of the rarer properties that we now know about are apparently found in geographically-restricted areas, rather than as isolated occurrences spread randomly across the world. An excellent example is the restrictionof object-initial languages (in our present knowledge) to Amazonia. Let us suppose that these languages had never beendiscovered (perhaps the tribes which spoke them might have died out in the last century); what therefore might have been ourconclusions about the possible basic word orders of human languages? It would have been tempting to suggest as anunrestricted universal that no languages have object-initial basic word order. Indeed, before the object-initial languages werediscovered, many linguists did indeed posit such an unrestricted universal. But the known existence of the other orders SOV,SVO, VSO and VOS should have made us wary: these orders tell us that in principle (a) languages can operate with differingorders of constituents, (b) the position of the verb is not fixed, (c) subjects can appear both before and after objects. Theseprinciples of course also admit the possibility of OSV and OVS orders. In such cases, we should have done better to make thestatistical claim. The general point seems to be that if it is possible to describe the observed properties of actually-occurring humanlanguages in terms of a set of principles which also permit non-observed properties, we should not base unrestricteduniversals on the simple fact that these properties have not been observed. Rather, we should say that the probability of alanguage possessing them is low. Many unrestricted universals might better be reframed as statistical ones without theirsignificance being thereby diminished: ultimately it must be hoped that the preponderance of one property over another can beshown not to be an accident of world-history, but correlated in a significant number of cases with such factors as the nature ofthe human cognitive system, the nature of language as a communicative system, or the principles which govern linguisticchange. The same criticisms which apply to unrestricted universals can also be levelled against the third kind of universal proposedin Greenberg, Osgood and Jenkins’s schema. These take the form: (iṱ ) For all x, if x is a language, then if x has property P, x has property QSuch a statement is called a universal implication by Greenberg, Osgood, and Jenkins, and an absolute implicationaluniversal by Comrie (1981:19). It allows for the existence of three classes of language: (a) languages which have both P andQ, (b) languages which have neither P nor Q, and (c) languages which have Q but not P. It would be falsified only by thediscovery of a language which had P but not Q. Such universals have played a major role in recent language universalsresearch. As a phonological example of a universal implication, we can cite Ferguson’s (1963:46) claim that in a given language thenumber of nasal vowel phonemes is never greater than the number of non-nasal vowel phonemes. In the form (iṱ ), this wouldread: for all x, if x is a language, than if x has n nasal vowel phonemes, x has m non-nasal vowel phonemes (where m ṱ n). Anexample of a nasal vowel phoneme would be the segment /ã/ in the French word dent /dã/ ‘tooth’/. Two recent samples havenot disconfirmed this universal. Crother’s (1978) survey of vowel systems, based on the Stanford Phonology Archive, workedwith a sample of 209 languages of which 50 (24%) had nasal vowel systems. Of these 50, 22 had the same number of non-nasal vowels as nasal vowels (m=n) and 28 had more non-nasal vowels than nasal vowels (m>n). Ruhlen’s (1978) sample ofapproximately 700 languages contained 155 (22%) with nasal vowel systems, of which 83 had the same number of non-nasalvowels as nasal vowels and 72 had more non-nasal vowels than nasal vowels. No languages in either sample had more nasalvowels than non-nasal vowels (n > m). A grammatical example of a claimed absolute implicational universal is Greenberg’s (1963:88) word order universal:languages with dominant VSO order are always prepositional. Prepositions are words like English in: they precede the nounphrases which they govern as in in Tokyo ...