Category: Universals Archive

Universal 1809: Original Standardized IF there is a voiced palatal stop, THEN there is a voiced bilabial stop. Keywords stop, palatal, bilabial, voice Domain phonology…

Universal 1825: Original Standardized IF there is a nasalized high back rounded vowel, THEN there is a high front unrounded vowel. Keywords vowel, nasal, high,…

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…