Topic summary
Implicational universal
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Linguistic universal.
Terminology
Linguists distinguish between two kinds of universals: absolute (opposite: statistical, often called tendencies) and implicational (opposite: non-implicational). Absolute universals apply to every known language and are quite few in number; an example is All languages have pronouns. An implicational universal applies to languages with a particular feature that is always accompanied by another feature, such as If a language has trial grammatical number, it also has dual grammatical number, while non-implicational universals just state the existence (or non-existence) of one particular feature.