Relativity, linguistic variation and language universals

Abstract

Language universals are usually thought of as properties holding of all languages. But very few, if any, such universals exist, due to the extreme structural diversity of languages. Instead, there are many typological universals, which allow for variation but constrain it or at least limit its distribution. This is true even of linguistic categories. Formal (grammatical or lexical categories) are not universal, but are constrained by the structure of conceptual space, as demonstrated by a multidimensional scaling analysis of adpositional semantic data from Levinson et al. (2003). Even so, broad conceptual categories are not universal either. Instead, what is universal is the holistic conceptualization of highly particular situation types, and the conceptual relationships that hold among them. This conclusion is confirmed by the analysis of data on within-language variation in verbalization from Croft (2010).

Keywords

• typology
• universals
• contrastive linguistics
• possession
• motion