Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1845: Original Standardized IF there is a breathy voice bilabial stop, THEN there is also a voiceless aspirated velar stop. Keywords stop, bilabial, velar,…

Universal 1861: Original Vowel Height Parameter: The development of some or all of the distinctive nasal processes occur preferentially in the context of low vowels…

Universal 1877: Original It seems that polarity [in gender/number systems] is never complete (i.e., polarity is never the sole configuration of gender/number markers under all…

Universal 1893: Original A lexical item whose meaning is verbal can never be included in the set of borrowed properties. Standardized A lexical item whose…

Universal 1909: Original If a language allows for the marker of predicative possession to be part of the range of functions covered by the marker…

Universal 1925: Original If a language has two modifier constructions that differ in linear order and in linguistic distance, the construction with a prenominal modifier…

Universal 1941: Original If an infix has an alternative position outside the word, that external position is always at the edge of the word to…

Universal 1957: Original … the hypothesis that a language which has CiCj clusters will also have CiCj stems … Standardized IF there are consonant clusters…

Universal 1973: Original A grammatical element is less likely to be omitted the greater the ambiguity which would result from its omission. Standardized A grammatical…

Universal 1989: Original simplification … in the typologically expected direction …In the process of category-collapsing, we normally expect as well as find the non-human or…