Language Universals : Abstract but not

نویسنده

  • Mark C. Baker
چکیده

I present the so-called Verb-Object Constraint as a serious proposal for a true linguistic universal. It provides an example of the kind of abstraction in linguistic analysis that seems warranted, of how different languages can confirm such a universal in different ways, and why approaches that avoid all abstractness miss important linguistic generalizations.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Language structure: psychological and social constraints

There are around 5.000 spoken languages of the world today, and they are all different. Thus, natural languages are very diverse. However, most linguists share the view that the languages of the world, and the way they are used in different communities, have a lot in common. The properties that all languages have in common are called language universals. Linguists have claimed of many different...

متن کامل

Language variation and linguistic invariants

Human languages are diverse and so precise statements of common properties must abstract away from specifics of particular languages. We note several abstract and absolute ‘Type 1’ universals and present some new ones built on a notion of ‘structural invariant’ that applies equally to constituent structure and individual grammatical morphemes. Crucially, these universals may be realized in stru...

متن کامل

Two Kinds of Universals and two Kinds of Groups

Philosophers have long debated about two ways of conceiving of universals: as Platonic universals and as Aristotelian universals. Roughly, Aristotelian universals are inherent in the particulars that instantiate them; they can be multiply located (located just where the instances are located), and they exist only if they have at least one instance. Platonic universals, by contrast, are truly ab...

متن کامل

Friederike Moltmann Two Kinds of Universals and Two Kinds of Collections

Natural language, as is well known, seems to involve a rather rich ontology. It easily allows for reference to universals (with nominalizations such as honesty) und thus seems to involve a realist ontology, with properties acting as objects. It also allows reference to collections of any sort (with plurals and conjunctive NPs) und thus seems to involve unrestricted composition. In this paper, I...

متن کامل

Unity and diversity in human language.

Human language is both highly diverse-different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals-and easily learnable. Any language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render human language unique in the biological world. Understanding the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally inte...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2009