Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1920: Original Only languages that distinguish tense and/or aspect in their verbal morphology will be likely to have an indicative-subjunctive distinction in complementation. Standardized…

Universal 1936: Original Indefinite word forms which synchronically contain an indefiniteness marker that already exists in the potential recipient language are more likely to be…

Universal 1952: Original There can … be [a] correlation between whether a language has grammatical noun classes or lexical noun classifiers, and its preference for…

Universal 1968: Original In a given language the grammatical categories of the verb (e.g., person, voice, mood, tense, negation) may be carried to a greater…

Universal 1984: Original If Ex and Cop are lexically separate in the present tense, they tend to share a single past tense. Standardized IF the…

Universal 2000: Original If a particular target type can mark agreement in gender then in many languages it must. … This may be called “enforced”…

Universal 2016: Original In all languages, some feelings can be described as “good” and some as “bad” (while some may be viewed as neither “good”…

Universal 3: ergative alignment ⇒ also accusative alignment Original Grammatical systems with ergativity tend to have ergative-accusative splits. Standardized IF alignment is ergative for some…

Universal 17: SA head-present ⇒ SA head-missing Original If Suffixaufnahme occurs with the head present, it also occurs with the head missing. Standardized IF Suffixaufnahme…

Universal 33: SA ⇒ external case without internal case Original If a language has Suffixaufnahme, it also has the external case occurring without the internal…