Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1841: Original Standardized IF there is a palatalized voiceless dental-alveolar stop, THEN there is also a voiceless dental-alveolar stop. Keywords stop, dental-alveolar, palatalized, voice…

Universal 1857: Original A trill is found to occur in a stressed position, to denote emphasis, or in slow speech. As against this, a flap…

Universal 1873: Original Implicational patterns in the cross-linguistic coding of subordination:(a) If there is elimination of Aspect, then there is elimination of Tense and Mood.(b)…

Universal 1889: Original The relation of the retroflex to the dental consonants proves to be a mere variety of the opposition of pharyngealized and non-pharyngealized…

Universal 1905: Original Languages with syntactic relations usually use diathesis changes (voices) that promote and /or demote NPs in the clause, while languages without syntactic…

Universal 1921: Original It seems that all languages with subjunctive complements can use subjunctives as main clauses (though the reverse may not be true). Standardized…

Universal 1937: Original If there is a word-form loan of a personal indefinite in a language, then there is a word-form loan of an temporal…

Universal 1953: Original Wo nun der Druckakzent eine feste Stelle erhält, hat er oft zur Folge, daß die Vokale der nichtbetonten Silben flüchtig gesprochen werden…

Universal 1969: Original There is a tendency for the existential, copulative, and verb-category carrying dummy elements of a language (a) synchronically to interpenetrate in complex…

Universal 1986: Original If Ex and Cop are lexically separate, and they are in a suppletive relation with verbs meaning ‘become’ and ‘stay’, then ‘become’…