Implicational universal

Translations

universale implicazionale | universaux implicationnels | Implikationen

Article

Concept introduced by Greenberg (1963), who observed that the presence of some typological features within a language will generally predict, with a fair level of accuracy, the presence of other features.

Contrary to absolute universals, the implications between typological structures are not infallible: several cases exist in which an expected match is not present in one language. Therefore, the label "universal", which survives as it has become traditional, is in fact a misnomer.

Example

An implicational universal is the tendency for verb-final languages (OV languages) to also exhibit postposition instead of preposition. This is confirmed in the Anatolian branch of Indo-European by Luwian, Palaic and Hittite, which all feature clause-final verbs as well as postpositional phrases. However, a very trivial example of a violation of this implication is provided by one of the best known ancient Indo-European languages, Latin, which features clause-final verbs but uses prepositional phrases, thereby exhibiting a mixed head-final and head-initial order in its phrasal architecture.

References

Greenberg, J.H. 1963. Universals of Language, Cambridge, MA.