Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1979: Original rigid type III (verb-final) …Compound verbs. In addition to simple verbs there are compound verbs including such types as (a) noun-like or…

Universal 1995: Original And some [semantic] criteria appear never to define a gender completely. … I have not found a language of any family in…

Universal 2011: Original … if a system does show functional markedness it is generally the case that (i) when the number of choices in the…

Universal 2027: Original Measure the (sonorant) rime duration, and you’ll get the right contour tones in the right places: (a) by syllable type: CVV >>…

Universal 13: Original If direct objects may control agreement (or take case marking) without doing so obligatorily, it will be the more definite and/or the…

Universal 28: Präfixaufnahme ⇒ ¬ligative Original In no language is there Präfixaufnahme involving a ligative. Standardized IF Aufnahme is Präfixaufnahme rather than Suffixaufnahme, THEN there…

Universal 44: Original Standardized Assuming that grammatical relations are ordered from left to right according to their decreasing semantic concreteness and correspondingly increasing grammaticalization as…

Universal 60: Adj Adv ⇒ N Adj & VO Original If some or all adverbs follow the adjective they modify, then the language is one…

Universal 76: Original Only languages in which promotion to subject via passivization results in verb coding the semantic case of the promoted non-agent exhibit the…

Universal 92: Prep ⇒ ((N Dem v N Num ⇒ N A) & (N A ⇒ N G) & (N G ⇒ N Rel)) Original…