Complete the account of typology.
A universal induced from a sample of attested languages is a ______ universal, while one attributed to the language faculty is a ______ one. A statement of the form "if a language has X it also has Y" is ______. The most common basic word order is ______.
Word bank: taxonomic · theoretical · implicational · SOV · absolute · statistical
Hints
- The first pair is Greenberg against Chomsky.
- The most common order puts the verb last.
Show the answer
A universal induced from a sample of attested languages is a taxonomic universal, while one attributed to the language faculty is a theoretical one. A statement of the form "if a language has X it also has Y" is implicational. The most common basic word order is SOV.
SOV at about 41 per cent is the answer students most often get wrong, because English is SVO and the languages most often taught in Europe are too. Japanese, Turkish, Korean and Hindi are all verb-final, and the type is the most common on earth.
Practise Universals and Typology
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More questions on Universals and Typology
- Approximately what percentage of languages with a dominant word order place the subject before the object?
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