aikomusteoria
aikomusteoria is a theoretical framework that emerged in the early 21st century within the field of comparative linguistics. The term, derived from the Finnish words aikomu (meaning 'time measure') and teoria (meaning 'theory'), was introduced by the Finnish linguist Markku Virtanen in 2002. aikomusteoria proposes that all human languages possess an underlying temporal structure which governs the sequencing of syntactic and morphological elements. According to Virtanen, this temporal architecture can be expressed through a set of mathematical functions that map constituent order onto time intervals.
The core of aikomusteoria rests on three principles. First, the temporal layering principle states that a language’s
Researchers have applied aikomusteoria to comparative studies of Indo‑European, Uralic, and Austronesian language families. In the
Current research is exploring computational simulations of aikomusteoria, aiming to integrate annotated corpora with time‑quantified syntactic