Author: FP

Universal 134: Original Ergative languages favour SENT and SENT-POSS ANCs and disfavour POSS-ACC and NOMN ones. Standardized IF there is ergative alignment, THEN action nominalizations…

Universal 122: Original If in a language the same verbal meaning is expressible either through a construction where a complement of the verb is in…

Universal 123: Original In some languages objects [sic] — whether objects of transitive or subjects of intransitive sentences — may be alternatively marked by an…

Universal 124: Original IF there are aspirated stops (especially voiceless labial and alveolar), THEN there is /h/. Standardized IF there are aspirated stops (especially voiceless…

Universal 125: Original If a language has both SOV in a full sentence and determining N+determined N in a Noun Phrase, then it has at…

Universal 126: N Num ⇒ N Rel;equivalently: Rel N ⇒ Num N Original If a language has noun before numeral, then it has noun before…

Universal 127: Original No language has syntactic means (dependent marking, head marking, word order) which are exclusively used in ANCs. Standardized IF any kinds of…

Universal 132: SENT (ANC) ⇒ SOV & G N Original Languages with the SENT type of ANCs are to a large extent SOV/GN languages. Standardized…

Universal 133: Original It is relatively unusual for languages (in ANCs) to combine sentential dependent-marking for the S with non-sentential marking for the A or…

Universal 146: Original Tendency: in SOV-languages adjectives can be the head of NPs whereas SVO-languages and VSO-languages tend to require a dummy head noun (‘thing’,…