ABSTRACT
The study of typological universals stems from work in linguistics by Greenberg. In this approach to the study of universals, linguists attempt to discover similarities/differences in languages throughout the world. That is, the attempt is to determine linguistic typologies, or what types of languages are possible. This chapter considers an example of typological universals focusing on what the implications are for second language acquisition. We can think of languages as being head-initial or head-final, where the head is a verb or a noun. In a head-initial language, the verb will precede the noun, and in a head-final language, the verb will follow the object. For implicational universals to have any importance in the study of second language acquisition, two factors must be taken into consideration. First, one must understand why a universal is a universal. Second, there must be an arguable relationship between the features in question.
