: Variation and Linguistic Theory . Charles-James H. Bailey.

Linguistic Variation and Computation

Language variationists study how languages vary along geographical or social lines or along lines of age and gender. Variationist data is available and challenging, in particular for DIALECTOLOGY, the study of geographical variation, which will be the focus of this paper, although we present approaches we expect to transfer smoothly to the study of variation correlating with other extralinguist...

Charles H. DePuy (1927-2013).

Charles Darwin's Theory of Pangenesis

In 1868 in England, Charles Darwin [5] proposed his pangenesis [6] theory to describe the units of inheritance between parents and offspring and the processes by which those units control development in offspring. Darwin coined the concept of gemmules, which he said referred to hypothesized minute particles of inheritance thrown off by all cells of the body. The theory suggested that an organis...

Language variation and linguistic invariants

Human languages are diverse and so precise statements of common properties must abstract away from specifics of particular languages. We note several abstract and absolute ‘Type 1’ universals and present some new ones built on a notion of ‘structural invariant’ that applies equally to constituent structure and individual grammatical morphemes. Crucially, these universals may be realized in stru...

Linguistic Invariants and Language Variation

Since the publication of Noam Chomsky’s field founding Syntactic Structures in 1957, generative grammarians have been formulating and studying the grammars of particular languages to extract from them what is general across languages. The idea is that properties which all languages have will give us some insight into the nature of mind. A widely acknowledged problem to which this work has led i...