Re: Universal grammar


Hans Aberg wrote:
In article <1161093724.915199.54370@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Peter
T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A long time ago, in the early 1970s, a fellow had a book with a kind of
universal grammar, describing what is common to language specific
grammars. For example, it would classify the tense of verbs according to
point of time and temporal direction: past, present, future, thus giving
nine possibilities, noting that Turkish(?) is one of the few languages
having the "future future" tense.

What book might this have been? Are there similar, more contemporary
references?

Not the four-volume set edited by Joseph Greenberg *Universals of Human
Language* published by Stanford UP in 1978?

There have been plenty of works along these lines. You might look up
Bernard Comrie.

Thank you for the references. It does not as such make any difference if
it is the original book. But the story above goes back to some of the
years 1972-75, so unless there is some earlier edition of the book you
mention, it is not the one.

The study of linguistic universals was initiated by Greenberg at the
conference published as *Universals of Language* in 1963 by MIT Press,
but I can't think of anything in that volume with the sort of
specificity you describe. It really didn't take off until he got the
funding at Stanford more than a decade later. Maybe you saw a preprint
or preliminary version of something from the Stanford Universals
Project, and that's definitely where you should start your
investigation.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: i do hope this isnt a wind-up....a language with 3 vowels and 8 consonants....
    ... very beginning of language, when it was just emerging from the ... isn't a disbelief in universals irrational? ... they have a low average age at death. ... Bear in mind term "innumerate" is approximate. ...
    (uk.politics.misc)
  • Re: i do hope this isnt a wind-up....a language with 3 vowels and 8 consonants....
    ... very beginning of language, when it was just emerging from the ... isn't a disbelief in universals irrational? ... Clearer is the proxy of age heaping, but it's less relevant to your question ... Age heaping is the tendency of innumerate people to round ...
    (uk.politics.misc)
  • Re: Universal grammar
    ... The original question was actually about linguistic grammar universals, ... not language universals. ... canon of Cognitive Linguistics that to capture the wealth of semantic ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Universal grammar
    ... not language universals. ... I wouldn't spend too much time looking for those grammatical universals ... connectionism as generative grammar. ... still considered possible to build a general theorem prover in maths ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: unnatural languages
    ... You have to look at language, in and of itself, as a social phenomenon ... Theory has an interesting take on linguistic universals, ... Constraints that are universal (either innate or learned early due to ... something separate from the expression "natural language". ...
    (sci.lang)