Re: Gevey and Greenberg's Word Order Universals

On Sun, Sep 17, 2000 at 12:12:33PM +0000, Rik Roots wrote:
[snip]
> How relevant are universals to conlangs, or to natlangs? It seems to
> me that languages are essentially chaotic, with complexity generated
> from a few basic rules underlying each language. But I see no reason
> for all languages to share universals that govern the choice of how
> their basic rules will operate. Just my opinion, of course.
[snip]

I believe the underlying premise of universals is that all languages,
whether superficially similar or not, share an internal conformance to a
set of universal rules. I think this is based on the Chomskian idea of a
universal grammar, but I'm not a linguist so take this with a big grain of
salt :-)


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