Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1194: inflection (aspect v tense) ⇒ past v perfective gram Original With a few exceptions, if a language has inflectional tense or aspect, it…

Universal 1210: Original After incorporation of the noun the verb becomes intransitive (if it was not already so). From this follows that other syntactic phenomena…

Universal 1226: Original If there are cases differentiating where to relations other than terminative or prosecutive, then there will very likely be a terminative or…

Universal 1242: Original The likelihood of initial clusters is greater for languages with final consonants than for languages without final consonants, even greater for languages…

Universal 1258: Original Unstressed vowels are more likely to assimilate than stressed vowels. Standardized Unstressed vowels are more likely to assimilate than stressed vowels. Keywords…

Universal 1274: Original The same nuclear tagmeme which occurs initially in the unitransitive dominant order will occur initially in the bitransitive order. Standardized IF an…

Universal 1290: definite article (possessed NPs) ⇒ definite article (non-possessed NPs) Original If possessed NPs show the definite article, then so do non-possessed NPs. Standardized…

Universal 1306: SOV ⇒ Mood affixes on V are suffixed Original If a language has SOV, mood affixes on verb (if any) are suffixed with…

Universal 1322: Original No human language has a grammatically homogeneous vocabulary. Standardized No human language has a grammatically homogeneous vocabulary. Keywords vocabulary Domain lexicon Type…

Universal 1338: VO ⇒ flexion Original The more marked the position in which a word appears, the stronger the tendency for this word to present…