tailieunhanh - An Encyclopaedia of Language_04

Tham khảo tài liệu 'an encyclopaedia of language_04', ngoại ngữ, nhật - pháp - hoa- others phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 165 As Hockett 1963 3 points out statistical universals are no less important than unrestricted universals. One fundamental assumption of language universals research has to be the assumption that the actually occurring human languages are representative qualitatively and quantitatively of what is possible in human language. On the other hand it is dangerous in many cases to assume that because a particular property has not been observed in an actually occurring human language then it is in principle impossible. Many of the rarer properties that we now know about are apparently found in geographically-restricted areas rather than as isolated occurrences spread randomly across the world. An excellent example is the restriction of object-initial languages in our present knowledge to Amazonia. Let us suppose that these languages had never been discovered perhaps the tribes which spoke them might have died out in the last century what therefore might have been our conclusions about the possible basic word orders of human languages It would have been tempting to suggest as an unrestricted universal that no languages have object-initial basic word order. Indeed before the object-initial languages were discovered many linguists did indeed posit such an unrestricted universal. But the known existence of the other orders SOV SVO VSO and VOS should have made us wary these orders tell us that in principle a languages can operate with differing orders of constituents b the position of the verb is not fixed c subjects can appear both before and after objects. These principles of course also admit the possibility of OSV and OVS orders. In such cases we should have done better to make the statistical claim. The general point seems to be that if it is possible to describe the observed properties of actually-occurring human languages in terms of a set of principles which also permit non-observed properties we should not base unrestricted universals on .