Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1868: Original The most striking – and apparently universal – variability is in what can be called “degree of babyishness”. Changes in the degree…

Universal 1884: Original A split between 1st and 2nd person versus 3rd person marking is more likely with the verbal category assertive than with the…

Universal 1900: Original A pronominal form used for showing greater respect or social distance is never eliminated from the system of reference in favour of…

Universal 1916: Original It seems likely that no polysynthetic language has, within its system of pronominal affixes, a set of contrasts large enough to make…

Universal 1932: indefinite other than negative indefinite is borrowed ⇒ negative indefinite is borrowed Original If there is a word-form loan of other than negative…

Universal 1948: Original Class IIIa and Class Ib predicates cooccur in a language. Standardized IF non-canonical marking with Class IIIa predicates, THEN also non-canonical marking…

Universal 1964: Original all languages exhibit the following property: if clusters of n Cs are possible syllable-initially, then clusters of n-1 Cs are also possible…

Universal 1980: Original rigid type III (verb-final) …Sequences of events of the ‘go, do, and return’ type appear as ‘having done, return’ rather than ‘go…

Universal 1996: Original Note that there are no syntactic systems [of gender assignment] [only semantic, morphological, and phonological systems of gender assignment]. Standardized Gender cannot…

Universal 2012: Original A system of switch-reference marking is found only in languages with an accusative syntax. Standardized IF there is switch-reference marking, THEN alignment…