Category: Universals Archive

Universal 342: Original If the dominant position of the object with respect to the verb depends on morphological characteristics of the object, the dominant order…

Universal 358: Original If in a language an incorporated nominal direct object precedes the verb stem, then the autonomous subject precedes the predicate. Standardized IF…

Universal 374: Original It is impossible for minimal case systems to include, in addition to the basic general case, only a single further case exclusively…

Universal 390: aspirated consonant precedes an unstressed vowel ⇒ aspir. consonant precedes a secondary stressed vowel ⇒ aspirated consonant precedes a primary stressed vowel; Original…

Universal 406: inflections used cross-categorially ⇒ agglutinative (to an extent) Original If a language uses at least some of its inflections cross-categorially, the language is…

Universal 422: verb agreement with members following the verb ⇒ verb agreement with members preceding the verb Original There is no language where, given a…

Universal 438: ergative alignment ⇔ high complexity Original Ergative alignment is associated with high complexity. This correlation is not direct one, but a consequence of…

Universal 454: personal possessive prefixes ⇒ G N Original Personal possessive prefixes always imply a GN order, but not the converse; for personal possessive suffixes…

Universal 470: ergative/nominative (1 V (V.) 2 person pronoun) ⇒ ergative/nominative (noun) Original If in a language there is an opposition “ergative/nominative” in the declension…

Universal 486: Original If a language uses a non-zero case marking for a direct object on the animacy/definiteness hierarchies, then it uses a non-zero case…