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Duality of patterning: Absolute universal or statistical tendency?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2014

Juliette Blevins
Juliette Blevins*
Affiliation:
Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

As more of the world's languages are described and compared, more absolute universals have joined the class of statistical tendencies. However, few have questioned the universality of the duality of patterning. Following Hockett, most linguists assume that in all human languages, discrete meaningless parts combine to form meaningful units that, themselves, recombine. However, an alternative interpretation, explored in this article, is that duality, like other proposed linguistic universals, is a statistical tendency reflecting a complex set of factors, and most centrally, the need for some minimal number of basic units that can recombine to yield a potentially infinite set of form-meaning correspondences. If this is the essence of duality, then we expect: languages where duality is not a central component of grammar; languages where most, but not all, utterances are decomposable into meaningless phonological units; and different types of phonological building blocks in different languages. These expectations appear to be confirmed by natural language data.

Keywords

duality of patterninglanguage universalsstatistical tendenciesphonologyCharles F. Hockett
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 4 , Special Issue 4: New perspectives on duality of patterning , December 2012 , pp. 275 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2012

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