Structural universals

The Mereology of Structural Universals

This paper explores the mereology of structural universals, using the structural richness of a non-classical mereology without unique fusions. The paper focuses on a problem posed by David Lewis, who using the example of methane, and assuming classical mereology, argues against any purely mereological theory of structural universals. The problem is that being a methane molecule would have to co...

produce cultural universals Anna

Looking across human societies reveals regularities in the languages that people speak and the concepts that they use. One explanation that has been proposed for these “cultural universals” is differences in the ease with which people learn particular languages and concepts. A difference in learnability means that languages and concepts possessing a particular property are more likely to be acc...

Language universals at birth.

The evolution of human languages is driven both by primitive biases present in the human sensorimotor systems and by cultural transmission among speakers. However, whether the design of the language faculty is further shaped by linguistic biological biases remains controversial. To address this question, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine whether the brain activity of neonates is sen...

Linguistic diversity and universals

Universals in Semantics ∗

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, w...