Resumen de Formulating and misformulating language universals

Vladimir Pericliev

• Linguists usually define language universals as true statements for all (or almost all) languages. This definition, however, may be misleading since truthfulness alone does not guarantee the linguistic relevance of a posited universal. The article discusses a number of misformulations of universals from the linguistic literature, amends accordingly the concept of ‘universal’, and lists the correct logical form of all universals involving two parameters that can be derived from contingency (tetrachoric) tables.