Explaining language universals
Course author
Senior researcher and professor, MPI-SHH Jena and Leipzig University; Principal investigator, Grammatical Universals project
Course materials
Explaining language universals - handouts
Course annotation
In these lectures, I will tackle the issue of explaining grammatical structures. Linguists talk much about explanation, but since most of them work on particular languages, explanations are generally at the level of individual systems. A world-wide perspective allows us to ask deeper questions: What is it that explains universal tendencies (which are often very strong, so that we can call them “universals”)? I will argue that a large number of universals are due to efficiency of coding, although others have other explanations, and Universal Grammar explanations should not be excluded.