Abstract
As observed by linguist Joseph Greenberg (Greenberg 1963), languages across the world seem to share properties at all levels of linguistic organization. Some of these patterns are regularities in the crosslinguistic distribution of elements that hold across languages (non-implicational universals1). For example, sentential subjects almost always precede objects in declarative sentences (Greenberg 1963). Others, the so-called implicational universals, describe correlations between elements that vary together across languages: If a language has property A, then it most likely has property B. An example of such an implicational universal is the well-documented correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of case-marking (Blake 2001; Sapir 1921): Languages with flexible constituent order often use morphological means, such as case, to mark grammatical function assignment (e.g., German, Japanese, and Russian), whereas languages with fixed constituent order typically lack case morphology (e.g., English and Mandarin).
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | The Usage-Based Study of Language Learning and Multilingualism |
Publisher | Georgetown University Press |
Pages | 211-232 |
Number of pages | 22 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781626163256 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781626163249 |
State | Published - Jan 1 2016 |
Externally published | Yes |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences