Greenberg Joseph H. (Ed.). Universals of Human Language: Volume 1: Method and Theory

Stanford University Press, 1978. — 307 p.The mainspring of the contemporary interest in language universals is the conviction that linguistics as a science must develop broader goals than the description of the structures of the thousands of individual languages which exist in the present or of which we have records from the past. It must be broader even than a body of generalizing theory concerning how such descriptions can be carried out.