Universals and Diachrony: Some Observations
This chapter reviews the preceding chapters in this volume. It says that although each one makes an original claim, none of them is sufficiently concerned with replicability and falsifiability to enable linguists to make one confident that the claims are valid generalizations about language or grammar. Falsifiable claims and rigorous, replicable, and sizable cross-linguistic surveys of relevant phenomena and their origins are needed before we can make confident pronouncements on the relationship between language universals and language change. This means that progress in this field requires thorough description and documentation of all languages; full comparative-historical description and reconstruction, with explicit accounts of changes, for very many languages and families; and a robust framework-neutral terminology and theoretical apparatus.
Keywords: language change, universals, linguistics, replicability, falsifiability
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .