Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1914: Original OV languages, on the whole, tend to have a marked accusative. Standardized IF basic order is OV, THEN the “promoted” direct object…

Universal 1930: personal indefinite is borrowed ⇒ impersonal indefinite is borrowed Original If there is a word-form loan of a personal indefinite in a language,…

Universal 1946: Original Plural markers tend to originate on personal nouns and to spread in both directions, to inanimate nouns, on the one hand, and…

Universal 1962: Original Within lexical morphemes of the shape C1VC2V, the sonority of C1 tends to be less than that of C2, with C1 tending…

Universal 1978: Original rigid type III (verb-final) …Conjunctive verb form. There is a frequently-used, non-final verb form, a “conjunctive”, with the semantic value ‘having done…

Universal 996: Original [Unfortunately, or luckily,] all grammars leak. Standardized All grammars leak. Keywords analogy, iconicity, economy, plumbing Domain phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. Type…

Universal 2010: Original Overall Dependency Hierarchy between Grammatical Systems: 1. Polarity (I)2. Tense; Aspect; Evidentiality (II)3. { Person; Reference classification (gender etc.) (III)4. { Number…

Universal 2026: Original voiceless geminate stops should be preferred over voiced ones, due to aerodynamic concerns. Standardized IF there are voiced word-initial geminate stops, THEN…

Universal 10: Common Proper ⇒ G N Original With much better than chance frequency, if in apposition the common noun usually precedes the proper noun,…

Universal 26: Original In all languages that mark a constituent preposed to the noun for inflectional categories such as number, gender, or case, constituents postposed…