Implicational phonological universals
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Vladimir Pericliev
The UPSID database, comprising the segment inventories of 451 languages, was computationally inspected for implicational universals of type “If Segment A, then Segment B”. The system found 146 statistically significant (near) universals that are supported by languages from at least two language families from at least two geographical areas. Some implications of these findings are discussed. A principle holding for implicational phonological universals is proposed, stating that the antecedent and the consequent of an implicational universal must share at least one feature and, additionally, the consequent must have an equal or smaller number of features than the antecedent. The principle is both statistically significant and highly predictive (valid in 94.5% of all found universals).
© Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europaea
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Articles in the same Issue
- Direct and indirect explanations of typopological regularities: The case of alignment variations
- On the constructional semantics of gerundive nominalizations
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- Richard Hudson: Language networks: The new Word Grammar
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- Bert Cornillie (Leuven): Report on the 40th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Joensuu, 29 August—1 September 2007)
- Conference announcement: 41st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
- Publications received
