A Brief Introduction for Prospective Users — Universals Archive

Frans Plank and Elena Filimonova (Universität Konstanz)

Originally published in Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 53 (2000) 109–123. Updated by Frans Plank and Thomas Mayer, August 2006.

This introduction was written for the original FileMaker Pro database version of the archive. References to that interface have been preserved as written; the archive has since been rebuilt as a web-based system, but the description of the archive's content, scope, and intellectual aims remains accurate.

The Universals Archive aims to be a comprehensive documentation of the linguistic universals on record. Currently including over 2,000 entries, it has for some time now been available on the internet as a searchable database. For its updating and overhaul the cooperation of the typological community is solicited. Here we outline what kind of information is held in the archive and how it can be accessed and used.

Typology is about how languages, or rather their grammars and lexicons, can and cannot differ from each other, and universals are the laws regulating crosslinguistic variation. Although the typological research programme has been under way for several centuries now, there is regrettably little awareness of just how many such putative laws have been accumulating. Often what comes to mind, even that of many a practicing typologist, is little more than (a subset of) the 40 or so universals suggested in Greenberg (1963) and conveniently collected in the appendix of this modern classic. Perhaps, if universals had been named after their discoverer as laws are in other sciences (even when they are so unlawlike as Saussure's Law and other such diachronic regularities, limited in scope to particular families or indeed languages), their impact would have been greater. In actual fact, there are laws galore on record, though few have been officially passed by the typological legislature and no systematic effort has ever been made at proper codification. In view of their significance for the field, these scattered laws, whatever their substance and quality, deserve to be collected and recorded and to be made available for ready consultation.

Occasionally, more or less narrowly circumscribed selections of universals have indeed been catalogued, notably in Burquest et al. (1982), Kirby (1995), and Plank (1998)¹. Within the national typology programme of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, initiated in 1996, a more comprehensive effort in this direction has been made by the project Sprachbaupläne, based at the Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft of the Universität Konstanz². The remit of this project was to document existing universals, no matter how hypothetical their validity, and not to suggest new ones: a putative universal needed to be in print, or at least forthcoming, in order to get into the Universals Archive. All that was added when a universal was being archived were comments of various sorts, contributed by the archivists or again drawn from the literature. Although this collection of published universals was far from complete and the documentation of those already collected sometimes lacked polish, the Universals Archive was made available as a searchable database on the internet in 1999, as a tool for typologists and as an invitation for its further extension and refinement.

What is being documented in the Universals Archive are linguistic universals. This notion is neither trivial nor self-explanatory; still, a few remarks will have to suffice here concerning what is and is not covered by the archive.

First, although the dividing line is sometimes difficult to draw, to qualify for inclusion in the archive universals ought to be substantive rather than being "design features", whose universality is definitional (such as vocal-auditory channel, evanescence, duality of patterning; see Hockett 1963): lacking them, a communication system, instead of being considered a counterexample, would not be called a natural "language"³.

Second, the substantive universals that are entered in the archive are statements preceded by a universal quantifier ranging over all natural languages; and in their basic form, which is not always easy to discern, they are either unconditional ("For all languages, there is or is not p") or conditional, and in particular implicational, prescribing co-variation of two or more logically independent variables ("For all languages, if there is or is not p, then there will or will not be q"). Thus, to be universal, properties must be universally shared or, if they are not shared by all languages, they must not vary independently across the domain of all languages. This is a somewhat restrictive notion of universality, favouring a conception of universal grammar as the intersection of particular grammars rather than as their union set, this latter set being the grand repository of anything that any language is free to select.

Third, universals are often conceded even by their proponents to be mere tendencies rather than categorical laws; such statistical universals are entered in the archive, unlike those regularities explicitly claimed to be limited to areas or families (Euroversals, Bantuversals, and the like).

Fourth, laws are timeless; still, it is possible for universals to have a time dimension — as in claims that whenever a language has a particular property, it must have acquired it in a particular way and from a particular source.

Fifth, going again for archiving liberality, the properties figuring in the universals documented include all conceivable kinds of units, categories, constructions, rules, constraints, principles, or relationships between them, regardless of how concrete or abstract, theory-neutral or theory-bound.

To get started on our guided tour, entry #31 — one of Moravcsik's Many Laws — serves to illustrate what kind of information is maximally provided in an entry in the archive.

For identification, entries are serially numbered, reflecting the order in which universals have been entered. Universals which are thematically related can be found and collected together by following up cross-references in the Comments section. Of course, when searching for particular domains or keywords, this will define thematic subsets of universals in the first place.

The documentary part of an entry begins with the field Original, where the universal is reproduced approximately as stated in the original source. For various reasons, including readability and limitations of space, it is not always advisable to reproduce the source literally. Also, we translate into English even when source languages are among the more widely read ones (such as Russian). Subsequently the original statement is, if necessary, standardized in style and terminology. Such transformations are always meaning-preserving, and sometimes meaning-enhancing. It is these Standardized versions that are recommended to archive users for all practical purposes. Ideally they ought to be Authorized Versions, but obtaining authorization has so far not always proved viable. (So far as possible, we continue trying.)

We had intended to standardize and indeed formalize universals yet further; but this has largely remained a task for the future. Presently the field Formula is of little utility, and is best ignored by users.

The fields Keywords and Domain classify universals by content at different levels of generality. At the highest level we currently distinguish these domains and domain-combinations: syntax, morphology (sometimes differentiated as inflection and word formation), phonology (sometimes specified as prosodic phonology), phonetics, semantics, and lexicon. Lower-level keywords are devised as we go along.

The following three fields — Type, Status, and Quality — classify universals by kind.

The basic types of universals are unconditional (like #1181, a lexical one, for a change) or conditional. The most important conditional relationship is that of material implication (one-way or mutual); but from the way relationships are sometimes named and characterized in the sources (e.g., "p correlates with q", "p and q are mutually conducive", "p favours q", "p authorizes q") it is not always easy to determine whether this is the intended reading. Attention is also drawn to possibly misleading formulations of universals as implications in the original source. Not infrequently, what is given in the form of an if-then statement is not really a material implication but a kind of conditional relationship which is paraphrasable as "q, provided/given that p". Implications can be transposed under negation of both implicans and implicatum: "if p then q" is equivalent with "if not q then not p" (e.g., "if there is a trial, then there is a dual" = "if there is no dual, then there is no trial"); if relationships fail the test of transposition, they are not genuine implications, or need some tinkering to reveal their implicational essence. Universals #12 and #170 are examples.

Status is about the historical nature of universals. When they are purportedly of timeless validity, proscribing or prescribing structures independent of previous or later states of a language, they are referred to as "achronic". "Diachronic" universals are laws of change, linking structures of an earlier with those of a later stage of a language and perhaps specifying a mechanism of how to get from one to the other. The problem is that these labels are frequently a matter of interpretation, and ultimately raise profound questions about the relationship between typology and diachrony. Without going into this issue here, we refer back to #31 as an example of a universal that is clearly intended as (and presumably indeed is) achronic. So is #17, while #38 is clearly intended as diachronic; and this pair goes to show how intricately achronic and diachronic universals may be related to each other, with the latter potentially rendering the former redundant. Universal #1287 posits hierarchies which are equally meaningful as timeless crosslinguistic constraints on segment inventories and as steps in the historical spreading within a language of the process in question, with the author of the universal himself wavering between an achronic and a diachronic reading.

Visitors can access the Universals Archive in two different ways: they can browse through it or they can search it for anything they hope to be in it. To familiarize themselves with what they can reasonably expect to find, it is recommended that they first browse a bit, scrolling through universals. Keywords are the likeliest guides for systematic searches, and links from references given in individual entries lead to the separate bibliography.

When searching, universals can be retrieved in terms of any string of symbols or any combinations of symbol strings which occur in any field of an entry, from Number to Comments. Searchers need to enter the term(s) in the relevant field(s) and click "Search". The search finds entries where the term occurs anywhere in the field.

Within one field, any number of words can be entered. This is a possibility that will be particularly appreciated by typologists, who are after all out to discover co-variation, and for co-variation you need (at least) two variables. For example, if you are curious whether switch-reference has been claimed to co-vary with anything about the order of any kind of elements, simply enter these two words (switch-reference order) in any of the fields Keywords, Original, or Standardized and click "Search" — the archive will return entries #613, #614, and #615. Those who suspect that tone somehow correlates with case, and type in these two words together, will be pleased (or disappointed) to discover that no one before them has gone on record with such a suspicion, to the best of the archivists' current knowledge.

Sometimes a single conditional universal itself involves more than two variables. The best-known instances are claims that a pattern — such as agreement (cf. universal #45), relativization, number distinction, or palatalization (#1287 above) — follows a hierarchy with several positions. Otherwise, however, information about how individual universals link up to form whole chains and networks, thus defining "the great underlying ground-plans of language" (that "tout se tient" is unlikely), is far less convenient to extract from the archive. It is so far only by hand that users can piece together implications as in the following examples.

Often enough, when implications which are entered individually in the archive are connected, and transitivity is employed to link directly variables which are only linked indirectly in such chains, there is no encouragement but cause for concern. However, discovering inconsistencies through such uses of the archive is just as well, since at this stage of the typological enterprise only few universals can rightfully shed the epithet "putative".

The Universals Archive currently includes over 2,000 entries, and is constantly being overhauled and updated⁴. Since much relevant literature has so far remained unread by the local archivists, and some has no doubt been misread, the coverage of structural areas is patchy, and what is covered may fall short of perfection. To bring the archive up to scratch we solicit the cooperation of the typological community. We welcome constructive comments of all kinds. And in particular: do send in, or correct, your own universals and those of your friends and enemies — or at any rate counterexamples to those of the latter!

Frans Plank & Elena Filimonova (& Thomas Mayer)
Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz
78457 Konstanz, Germany
frans.plank@uni-konstanz.de · thomas.mayer@uni-konstanz.de · ef263@cam.ac.uk

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