Category: Universals Archive

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 16: Original In almost all instances of Suffixaufnahme, the segmental marker of internal case is closer to the stem of the attributive nominal than…

Universal 32: SA ⇒ internal case without external case Original If a language has Suffixaufnahme, it also has the internal case occurring without the external…

Universal 48: Original The noun phrase (NP) internal distribution of case between head noun and any agreeing constituents is determined by dominance relations defined on…

Universal 64: Original In nominative-accusative languages the causee of causative verbs derived from transitive verbs is an oblique object, whereas in ergative languages it is…

Universal 80: Original There is no language in which the subject must be first demoted (via passivization) before it can be relativized. Standardized Relativization is…