ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the data and descriptive universal statements proposed to characterise the patterns they exhibit, and discusses some reservations to be borne in mind when such data and universals are brought into the explanatory domain characterised by the unified approach. The work of Hawkins and Gilligan (H&G) has considerably improved on the quality of Greenberg's universals by putting meat on the skeletal corpus of the 1966 study. According to H&G, the Head Ordering Principle (HOP) accounts for the preference for exclusive prefixing in Prep/verb/object (VO) languages; however, it does not predict the skew towards suffixing in both language types. Affixal morphology is employed by nearly all the world's languages to express modifications or specifications of the role or the meaning of a stem morpheme in its sentential context. A single affix may appear fixed before, internal to, or at the end of the stem form although the internal affix is extremely rare compared with prefixation and suffixation.
