Universal 44:
- Original
- Standardized
- Assuming that grammatical relations are ordered from left to right according to their decreasing semantic concreteness and correspondingly increasing grammaticalization as in the diagram (where arrows indicate attested diachronic grammaticalization), then
IF there is noun-phrase external agreement with a relation of any column of this diagram, THEN there will be noun-phrase external agreement with the relations of all columns to its right.
IF there is overt case marking for a given column, THEN there will be overt case marking for all columns to its left.
- Keywords
- NP, adjunct, direct object, indirect object, subject, attributive, locative, instrumental, comitative, directional, ergative, case, agreement
- Domain
- inflection, syntax
- Type
- implicational hierarchy
- Status
- achronic
- Quality
- statistical
- Basis
- ?
- Source
- Lehmann 1988: 64, Plank 1991c: 534 (rephrased)
- Counterexamples
1. Lehmann’s formulation: The more purely syntactic and semantically diverse a relation, the more it is predestined to be encoded by agreement; and the more semantically concrete a relation, the more it is predestined to be encoded by case.2. As is acknowledged, some languages which case-mark direct objects but not subjects or absolutives are a problem for the second part of this generalization.