Category: Universals Archive

Universal 567: Original If there are high and low social varieties of a language and only one of them has an article, it will usually…

Universal 583: Original Semantically simple morphemes are never systematically more complex in phonetic form than semantically more complex ones. Standardized IF morphemes are semantically less…

Universal 599: Original In all languages where causative verbs take complement noun phrases that have an accusative case-marker, the range of noun phrases that occur…

Universal 615: Subject > Direct Object> Indirect Object > Oblique Object > Attributive > Object of Comparison Original Accessibility Hierarchy:Subj> DO > IO > Obl…

Universal 631: Original If a language has a scopal quantifier word, then that word is a distributive quantifier word. Standardized IF there is a scopal…

Universal 647: Original In a language in which categories of proximity are employed to show degrees of respect or social distance, the one used to…

Universal 663: tag questions with ¬rising contour ⇒ tag questions with rising contour Original The presence of tag questions with nonrising (or higher pitched or…

Universal 679: double negation ⇒ Neg Verb Neg Original If there is double negation within a language, then the negatives normally precede and follow the…

Universal 695: Original Standardized IF there are more than three vowels, THEN / ¥ / or / ™ / will be among them. Keywords vowel…

Universal 711: Original The phrasal categories appear to form a hierarchy: S —VP—AP—PP—NP.It is claimed that a language will not use one co-ordination strategy for…