Category: Universals Archive

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…

Universal 42: Original If a language has Suffixaufnahme at one time and at some later point it does not, one possible successor construction is the…

Universal 58: Original When the general rule is that the descriptive adjective follows, there may be a minority of adjectives which usually precede, but when…

Universal 74: Prep ⇒ (N Num ⇒ N A) Original If a language has Prep word order, then if the numeral follows the noun, the…

Universal 90: Original The object agreement marker in all languages where it exists bears a significant relationship to some pronouns of that language which is…

Universal 106: Original Agreement loss, at least with class and number as agreement features, diffuses lexically, at least as far as adjectival targets are concerned.…

Universal 122: Original If in a language the same verbal meaning is expressible either through a construction where a complement of the verb is in…

Universal 138: Original If a language has de-verbal case markers at all, it is likely to have a de-verbal Locative case marker. Standardized IF there…

Universal 154: Original If the same adposition is used as a marker for both object and dative, including such non-prototypic datives as projected recipient, then…

Universal 170: Original If a language has case affixes on nouns, they are almost always suffixed. Standardized IF there are case affixes on nouns, THEN…