Category: Universals Archive

Universal 809: wide & narrow vowels ⇒ (nasal & oral stops) & (labials & dentals) Original In child language, these two consonantal oppositions (nasal vs.…

Universal 825: Original If a language places relative pronouns that are not interrogative in form in initial position in postnominal relative clauses, then either that…

Universal 841: Original In all initial and final clusters, if there are sequences of length m and n and m >n, then the proportion of…

Universal 857: Original In initial and final clusters a lateral is never followed immediately by an r-type sound. In the initial system the sequence r…

Universal 873: Original If a language has at least one cluster containing n glottalized consonants, it has at least one cluster with n – 1…

Universal 889: OV ⇒ suffixes;VO ⇒ prefixes Original OV languages tend to have suffixes and VO languages prefixes. Standardized IF the word order is OV,…

Universal 905: Original Allomorphy cannot be conditioned across (grammatical) word boundaries. Standardized Allomorphy cannot be conditioned across (grammatical) word boundaries. Keywords allomorphy Domain morphology Type…

Universal 921: Original Standardized IF the voiced stop /g/ is absent from the velar group, THEN the corresponding voiced fricative /©/ must be present. IF…

Universal 937: Original No language has nasal vowels unless it also has one or more primary nasal consonants. Standardized IF there are nasal vowels, THEN…

Universal 953: Original If direct and indirect/non-direct objects differ in their morphological coding (at least minimally), then they will also differ in their syntactic behaviour…