This article adresses the issue of linguistic universals from the perspective of the Greenberghian, or typological approach to the study of language, and the functional-typological approach that originated from it. Attention is focused on issues such as the essentially empirical nature of linguistic universals, as revealed by cross-linguistic comparison, universals as patterns of uniformity (unrestricted universals) vs. universals as patterns of ordered variation (implicational universals and hierarchies), the role of semantic, pragmatic, processing and frequency factors in the explanation of universals (including the notion of competing motivations), and the status of universals in terms of mental representation.