This study explores the impact of annotation inconsistencies in Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks on typological research in computational linguistics. UD provides a standardized framework for cross-linguistic annotation, facilitating large-scale empirical studies on linguistic diversity and universals. However, despite rigorous guidelines, annotation inconsistencies persist across treebanks. The objective of this paper is to assess how these inconsistencies affect typological universals, linguistic descriptions, and complexity metrics. We analyze systematic annotation errors in multiple UD treebanks, focusing on morphological features. Case studies on Spanish and Dutch demonstrate how differing annotation decisions within the same language create contradictory typological profiles. We classify the errors into two main categories: overgeneration errors (features incorrectly annotated, since do not actually exist in a language) and data omission errors (inconsistent or incomplete annotation of features that do exist). Our results show that these inconsistencies significantly distort typological analyses, leading to false generalizations and miscalculations of linguistic complexity. We propose methodological safeguards for typological research using UD data. Our findings highlight the need for methodological improvements to ensure more reliable cross-linguistic generalizations in computational typology.

In his Universal 14, Greenberg stated that the normal and dominant order in all world languages was to place the condition before the conclusion in conditional sentences. We take this claim to review it quantitatively and based on occurrences in real texts in more than 50 languages. We can see that Greenberg’s proposal is correct but that it needs a reformulation to be true at all. We propose a quantitatively based and updated Universal 14, which gives a better account of the representation of the different languages analyzed and which is fulfilled in 100% of the cases (as opposed to Greenberg’s 60% in our sample). In addition, we also analyze adverbial sentences. Once we obtain the occurrence data in their direction (before or after the main verb), we plot a new Universal in a typometrical way: 100% of the languages show a higher proportion of preceding conditional clauses than of adverbial clauses, regardless of their type or the direction preference for adverbial clauses. The relationship between the SOV type and a stricter initial conditional location is also proposed.