Universal 671:
- Original
- Lexical items that are more stable than other items in one language family tend to be among the more stable items in another language family.
- Standardized
- IF lexical items are more stable than other items in one language family, THEN these items are among the more stable items in another language family.
- Keywords
- word
- Domain
- lexicon
- Type
- implication
- Status
- diachronic
- Quality
- statistical
- Basis
- sample of Oswalt 1975
- Source
- Oswalt 1975
- Counterexamples
What is the generalization?(i) Some lexical items are stabler than others.(ii) These stabler lexical items tend to be the same for all languages.Hence, knowing that lexical item is stable in language a, you can predict it will be stable in all other lgs.