The history of linguistics has for centuries seen a tug of war between theories that emphasize universals – those things that are common to all human languages, perhaps because they are part of our common biological endowment – and particulars – those things that look unique and appear to distinguish languages from one another.

At the turn of the twentieth century, partly as a legacy of colonialism, linguists started studying indigenous languages of Africa, Asia, and North America more seriously. In North America, the tradition of American Structuralism stressed the uniqueness of languages, not surprising, considering the linguistic diversity of native North American languages and their prodigious differences from one another and from more familiar and better studied Indo-European languages. With the advent of Generative Grammar in the middle of the twentieth century, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Chomskians stress what’s universal in languages, and search for ways to explain linguistic differences as the result of small choices that languages make from a universal set of options that our biological make-up, our hard-wiring for language as it were, makes available.

Understanding this universal set of options is ever more important today, with renewed efforts among linguists to study the many languages that are endangered. Universals and particulars are both important: until we have a sense of the full range of particulars, we can only begin to confront the issue of universals. That’s why studying the widest range of languages possible is so important.

Do we know anything about morphological universals? Yes – and you’ve gotten a taste of what we know here. We know, for example, that there is a range of word formation strategies that appear in the languages of the world. And there are some conceivable sorts of word formation strategies that never occur. We know, for example, that there’s no language so far that forms one sort of word from another – say nouns from verbs or verbs from nouns – by reversing the sounds of the words, or by infixing [p] after every third sound. But there are a lot of things we don’t know – what are possible forms of reduplication or infixing, for example, and what is impossible. So the search for particulars and universals goes on in tandem.