Category: Universals Archive

Universal 928: Original Standardized If in a given context nasal-vowel (NV) sequences occur, and /u/ represents the highest back rounded vowel appearing in these sequences,…

Universal 944: Original If nasal and oral vowels merge unconditionally, the phonetic result is always an oral vowel. Standardized When nasal and oral vowels merge…

Universal 960: Original If the numeral ‘one’ turns into anything, it becomes an indefinite article (and/or pronoun), the reverse is not necessarily true. Standardized Apart…

Universal 976: Original If there are analogical changes in their inflectional paradigms, the forms of non-local cases of common nouns are more likely replaced than…

Universal 992: conditional deranking ⇒ SVO Original Languages with conditional deranking typically prefer SVO word order. Standardized IF there is conditional deranking, THEN basic order…

Universal 1008: Exceed-2 V Exceed-3 Comparative ⇒ adjectives are nouny Original If a language has an Exceed-2 Comparative or an Exceed-3 Comparative, it is nouny.…

Universal 1024: Original If a language has a parts-of speech system of types 1-2/3 and has Predicate-initial basic word order, then it has HeadModifier basic…

Universal 1040: Original Concerning the relation of word prosody to phrase prosody: Word accent of the final syllable is lost unless phrase final, whereas internal…

Universal 1056: Original If verbs agree in Gender, they are very likely also to agree in Number. Standardized IF verbs agree in gender, THEN they…

Universal 1072: Original Where stress is demarcative (i.e., in languages with fixed stress), syllabification across word boundaries ought to be less likely than where stress…