Universal #491

Legacy number: 491

 Number  489
 Original  With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional.
 Standardized  With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, IF basic order is SOV, THEN adpositions will come after their NPs (i.e., be postpositions).
 Formula  SOV ⇒ postposition
 Keywords  order, SOV, postposition
 Domain  syntax
 Type  implication
 Status  achronic
 Quality  statistical
 Basis  30 languages of Greenberg 1963 sample
 Source  Greenberg 1963: 79, #4

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Discussion
Counterexamples
1. Iraqw (S. Cushitic, Afro-Asiatic), Khamiti (Daic, Austroasiatic), standard Persian (Iranian, Indo-European), Amharic (Semitic, Afro-Asiatic), data from Greenberg 1963.2. Old Indic, an OV language, has some adpositions that appear as prepositions and not, as should be expected, as postpositions (Andersen 1983)
Notes
1. Andersen 1979 claims that the existence and subsequent usage of prepositions or postpositions is not dependent upon the order of verb and object.2. See also ##671, 495. #491 can be derived by transitivity from ##671 and 495.
Comment
Frans Plank · 3 Aug 2006
1. Andersen 1979 claims that the existence and subsequent usage of prepositions or postpositions is not dependent upon the order of verb and object.

2. See also <a class="innerLink" href="browse.php?entry_id=671"><img src="../img/entry.gif" border="0">, <a class="innerLink" href="browse.php?entry_id=495"><img src="../img/entry.gif" border="0">.
<a class="innerLink" href="browse.php?entry_id=491"><img src="../img/entry.gif" border="0"> can be derived by transitivity from <a class="innerLink" href="browse.php?entry_id=671"><img src="../img/entry.gif" border="0"> and <a class="innerLink" href="browse.php?entry_id=495"><img src="../img/entry.gif" border="0">.