Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1823: Original Standardized IF there is a labialized voiceless uvular ejective stop, THEN there is a voiceless uvular ejective stop. Keywords stop, uvular, ejective,…

Universal 1839: Original Standardized IF there is a voiceless palatal nasal, THEN there is also a voiceless bilabial nasal. Keywords nasal, palatal, bilabial, voice Domain…

Universal 1855: Original Consonantality of a neighboring sound has the effect of changing a nonlateral into a lateral whereas the nonconsonantality has the reverse effect…

Universal 1871: Original It holds as a strong statistical implication that whenever there is a 1st person exclusive dual there is also a 1st person…

Universal 1887: Original The Cleftability Hierarchy:Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique NP > Genitive NP > Object of Comparison. Syntactic positions on…

Universal 1903: Original Pure and mixed separatist languages prefer agglutinative morphology and free word order. Standardized IF a language is of the pure or the…

Universal 1919: Original If the verb in main clauses is inflected for subject or object agreement, then the verb in any sentence-like complement type will…

Universal 1935: local interrogative is borrowed ⇒ temporal interrogative is borrowed Original If there is a word-form loan of a local interrogative in a language,…

Universal 1951: Original If a negative polarity item (NPI) (in particular an auxiliary) can occur in some affective context, it will also appear in all…

Universal 1967: Original Every language has at least one set of forms or constructions whose primary function (or one of several major functions) is to…