Category: Universals Archive

Universal 286: Original If a causative morpheme is unproductive in relation to transitives, forming from them a relatively small (closed) group of trivalent causatives, among…

Universal 302: Original In the majority of languages the nominal and pronominal subject in the passive voice has the same grammatical patterning as the subject…

Universal 318: backness distinctions Š height distinctions Original The number of height distinctions in a system is typically equal or greater than the number of…

Universal 334: Original If a language has forms in which the object is expressed with a confix, then subject can also be expressed by confix…

Universal 350: Original In a dominant order the object and the verb are juxtaposed, i.e. no subject is placed between them. Standardized In a dominant…

Universal 366: agglutinative ⇒ derivational affixes have complex syllabic structure;flexive ⇒ derivational affixes have less complex syllabic structure Original Derivational affixes tend to have a…

Universal 382: Original The more topic-prominent a language, the less restricted the distribution of zero anaphora in that language. Standardized The higher the topic-prominence, the…

Universal 398: Original If a language has homonymous inflectional affixes that express a single meaning element, then, if the language has cumulative inflection at all,…

Universal 414: Original With the exception of some North-Western Caucasian languages, no European language has person-number cross-reference prefixed to possessed nouns. Standardized Person-number cross-reference markers…

Universal 430: Sg/Pl distinction (2 &/v 3 person) ⇒ Sg/Pl distinction (1 person); Original The singular-plural distinction is universal in free personal pronouns in the…