Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1888: Original Languages possessing the pairs voice–voiceless, aspirate–non-aspirate, have also a phoneme /h/. Standardized IF there is an opposition of voice vs. voiceless and…

Universal 1904: Original Cumulative languages prefer fusional morphology or rigid word order. Standardized IF a language is of the cumulative mixed type, THEN there will…

Universal 1920: Original Only languages that distinguish tense and/or aspect in their verbal morphology will be likely to have an indicative-subjunctive distinction in complementation. Standardized…

Universal 1936: Original Indefinite word forms which synchronically contain an indefiniteness marker that already exists in the potential recipient language are more likely to be…

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”…