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3.
Typological classification
4.
Typological
theory
Linguistic universals
. Under this term scholars understand certain
phenomenon or regularity which is common to all languages of the
world or to their absolute majority.
Linguistic universals are known long ago. In the ancient Greek
grammars the grammatical system of this language was suggested as a
model of categorization for all languages. That's
why grammatical
categories of case and gender used to be the main grammatical universal
for all languages.
In the 17
th
century French scholars Arnauld A. and Lanselot C.
wrote their Universal or Rational Grammar of the Port-Royal
concerning many Germanic languages. They compared phonetic,
grammatical and logical categories which
used to be the basis for
creating grammar of different languages. Port-Royal Grammar is of
great importance in linguisics, because it was the first work concerning
language universals.
The real language universals were produced in 1961 in the World
Congress of Linguists by the group of American scholars such as John
Greenberg, Lyle Jenkins and Charles Osgood.
The problem of universals is connected with the process of
unification of language facts and with elaboration of specific methods
of discovering linguistic universals. Some scholars think that creation
of full list of linguistic universals is the main task of linguistic typology.
They may be of different types:
synchronic and diachronic, absolute
and statistic (полные, неполные ), deductive - inductive, simple and
complex, universals of languages and of speech. They may be also
attached to the levels of language hierarchy.
Universals can be represented in the traditional way with the help
of words or with special symbols. For example:
1. If languages possess prepositions, they possess prefixes either.
If they don't
have prepositions, they lack prefixes. For example, the
English and Russian languages have prepositions and they have
prefixes either. Uzbek and other Turkic languages don't
have native
prefixes, but these languages have postpositions.
2. If languages possess dual number, they possess plural number
either. For example, in old English pronouns had singular, plural and
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dual numbers, but in modern English there exist only: singular and
plural. Dual number existed in Sanskrit, Greek and ancient Russian.
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