Abstract
As this book is about the universal properties of language, this chapter explains and organizes different approaches taken with respect to the notion of universals. A universal of language is defined as a property that holds across all kinds of natural language on Earth. The chapters in Parts II, III, and IV consider such properties.
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Notes
- 1.
Phrase structure grammar is often attributed mainly to Chomsky, but the idea originated in the preceding work of the great linguists Leonard Bloomfield and Zellig S. Harris (Blevins and Sag, 2013). Harris’s work also appears in this book in other chapters, such as Chaps. 11 and 12, for other major contributions.
- 2.
For instance, a cat’s paw in English is often referred to as a hand in Japanese.
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Tanaka-Ishii, K. (2021). Universals. In: Statistical Universals of Language. Mathematics in Mind. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59377-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59377-3_2
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