Why should we engage in language universals research and
language typology? What do we want to explain? It is a fact
that, although languages differ significantly and considerably.
indeed, no one would deny, that they have something in common;
how else could they be labelled 'language'? - There is obviously
unity among them, no matter how vaguely felt and for what
reasons: Scientific, practical, moral, etc. Neither diversity
per se nor unity per se is what we want to explain. There is no
reason whatsoever to consider either one of them as primary, and
the other as derived. What we do want to explain is "equivalence
in difference" – cf. our motto – which manifests itself, among
others, in the translatability from one language to another, the
learnability of any language, language change – which all
presuppose that speakers intuitively find their way from
diversity to unity. This is a highly salient property which
deserves to be brought into our consciousness. Generally then,
our basic goal is to explain the wa