Postfixation or inflection inside derivation

Abstract The paper discusses the widely accepted assumption concerning the postulated universal ordering of derivational and inflectional affixes, first proposed by Greenberg as Universal #28. Various theoretical and empirical predictions underlying this assumption are briefly outlined. A sample of 73 European languages and a sample of 58 ‘world’ languages are used to show the range of violations of Greenberg’s universal in order to propose a tentative typology of these violations, and to examine the relatedness of postfixation to the genetic type of a language and its areal characteristics.