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Abstract

A semantic perspective on language universals deals with absolute universals of meaning and the semantic import of syntactic and infl ectional categories, and lexical items. This paper takes a model-theoretical basis as primary and looks both at the independent semantics and at the mappings from syntax to semantics and from semantics to syntax. Denotational semantics is contrasted with conceptual semantics. The grammatical side of the discussion works mainly with categorial and cartographic approaches. The general approach is hypothetico-deductive and at every point in a description it is necessary to ask whether we are dealing with a universal property of human Language or with a property or distinction that is limited to one or several languages. In the latter case we need to ask about the space of variation and about dependencies across such spaces. Looking from grammar to meaning, the paper takes up nominal, verbal, and clausal constructions as well as subtopics: mass and count nouns, numbers and number, adjectival modification, kinds of verbs and verbal complexes.