Category: Universals Archive

Universal 936: Original Secondary nasal consonants are, apart from borrowing and analogical formations, always the result of diachronic developments from clusters. Standardized Secondary nasal consonants…

Universal 952: Original If direct and indirect/non-direct objects differ in their overt coding of whatever kind (at least minimally), then they will also differ in…

Universal 968: Original The decision whether the governor (head) or the governee (dependent) is morphologically marked tends to be made uniformly for all pairs of…

Universal 984: separative comparative ⇒ absolute anterior consecutive deranking & total identity deletion Original Languages with a separative comparative are languages with absolute anterior consecutive…

Universal 1000: Original In patterned symbolic processes (particularly distance symbolism), vowel ablaut has the highest frequency of occurrence and most random language distribution both geographically…

Universal 1016: Original If there are analogical changes in their inflectional paradigms, the forms (stems and affixes) of the present replace more likely the forms…

Universal 1032: Original Morphemically simple phonological words never have more than one main stress. Standardized Morphemically simple phonological words never have more than one main…

Universal 1048: SOV ⇒ ¬preclitics;VSO ⇒ ¬postclitic question markers Original If word order is SOV, then there are no preclitics.If word order is VSO, then…

Universal 1064: Original Languages often have mechanisms to remove stress from final position, often putting it in penultimate position; but there is no corresponding tendency…

Universal 1080: Original Duration of aspiration varies according to place of articulation: k > t > p. Standardized Duration of aspiration varies according to place…