Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1502: Original If there are regular violations of the tonal pattern in imperative or vocative forms, then there is a special redistribution of tones…

Universal 1518: Original In subject-final languages noun phrase questions can always be formed by putting the question word, e.g., Who? What? etc., in a preverbal…

Universal 1534: verb-initial ⇒ QSent Original In verb-initial languages, the question particle, if any, occurs sentence initial in yes-no questions. Standardized IF word order is…

Universal 1550: verb-initial ⇒ N Rel Original In verb-initial languages the dominant order of relative clauses is always postnominal. Standardized IF word order is verb-initial,…

Universal 1566: Original If there is a group of deagentive reflexive constructions, where (a) the agent can be expressed,(b) there is no subject, and (c)…

Universal 1582: Original If a language has a causative morpheme which expresses permissiveness, this morpheme usually combines with a larger group of verbal stems in…

Universal 1598: headless relative clause ⇒ productive nominalization Original Languages with headless relative clauses tend to have powerful and productive patterns of nominalization which are…

Universal 1614: Original If a language has grammatical agreement [see Comments for terminology], it is with just the A. Standardized IF person agreement of the…

Universal 1630: polysynthesis ⇒ ¬ NP reflexive Original All polysynthetic languages will lack overt NP anaphors, at least as objects. Standardized IF there is polysynthesis,…

Universal 1646: dependent-marked clause ⇒ dependent-marked relativization;head-marked relativization ⇒ head-marked clause Original For dependent-marking patterns, clause marking type implies relativization type; while for the head-marking…