TY  - INPR
A1  - Bickel, Balthasar
T1  - Absolute and statistical universals
T2  - To appear in: Hogan, P. C. (ed.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
N2  - Language universals are statements that are true of all languages, for example: “all languages have stop consonants”. But beneath this simple definition lurks deep ambiguity, and this triggers misunderstanding in both interdisciplinary discourse and within linguistics itself. A core dimension of the ambiguity is captured by the opposition “absolute vs. statistical universal”, although the literature uses these terms in varied ways. Many textbooks draw the boundary between absolute and statistical according to whether a sample of languages contains exceptions to a universal. But the notion of an exception-free sample is not very revealing even if the sample contained all known languages: there is always a chance that an as yet undescribed language, or an unknown language from the past or future, will provide an exception.
KW  - Sprachliche Universalien
Y1  - 2007
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15112
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1160382
UR  - http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~bickel/research/papers/universals_cels_bb.pdf
N1  - To appear in: Hogan, P. C. (ed.): The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences. - Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010
ER  -