Relativity, linguistic variation and language universals

Universal languages are often thought of as properties containing all languages. Due to the extreme structural diversity of languages, however, very few, if any, such universals exist. Rather, there are many typological universals that allow for variation but limit it or at least limit its distribution. This is true even among linguistic groups. Formal (grammatical or lexical categories) are not universal, but are restricted by the structure of conceptual space, as shown by a multidimensional scaling analysis of adpositional semantic data from levinson et al. (2003). Despite this, broad conceptual categories are not universal. Rather, what is universal is the holistic description of highly specific situation types and the conceptual relationships that exist between them. This conclusion is confirmed by an analysis of results on the cross-linguistic variation in verbalization from croft's.