Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1783: Original The Length Strategy: The longer a sentence is, the more likely it is to be classified as belonging to a more formal…

Universal 1799: Original There is a tendency for consonants to front initially and back finally. Standardized There is a tendency for consonants to front when…

Universal 1815: Original A voiceless dental-alveolar sibilant ejective affricate [”ts‘”] does not occur without a voiceless dental-alveolar sibilant fricative [”s”]. Standardized IF there is a…

Universal 1831: Original Standardized IF there is a laryngealized voiced labial-velar approximant, THEN there is also a glottal stop. Keywords stop, approximant, labial-velar, glottal, laryngeal,…

Universal 1847: Original See IPA. Standardized IF there is a breathy voice palato-alveolar sibilant affricate, THEN there is also a breathy voice velar stop. Keywords…

Universal 1863: Original “… wesshalb die Verdoppelung vorzüglich bei Adjectiven statt findet, da bei der Eigenschaft das besonders auffällt, daß sie nicht als einzelner Körper,…

Universal 1879: Original In many languages there is a strong correlation between the presence of an expletive subject and some definite argument elsewhere in the…

Universal 1895: Original A lexical item that is of the “grammatical” type (which type includes at least conjunctions and adpositions) cannot be included in the…

Universal 1911: Original If a language has an optative mood, it also has a subjunctive or an imperative mood. Standardized IF there is an optative…

Universal 1927: Original If nothing else in the language agrees with nouns in terms of class, numeral expressions will. Standardized IF anything other than numerals…