The study of universal — properties common to most or all languages—holds a prominent place in the contemporary study of language. One surprising result of research in this area is that relatively few similarities across languages are apparently attributable to the sharing of "absolute" universals. Most similarities are rather to be accounted for in terms of implicational universal (if a language has property P it will also have property Q) or parametric universal (not that all or most languages have some absolute property P, but that a language will select a variant of such a property from a universally fixed set.