This thesis proposes an extended version of the Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) formalism, with the following features: 1. grammars incorporate inheritance hierarchies of lexical types, defined over a simple, feature-based constraint language 2. CCG lexicons are, or at least can be, functions from forms to these lexical types This formalism, which I refer to as ‘inheritance-driven’ CCG (I-...

The concept of linguistics has isolated language from other natural systems, and linguistics has remained overwhelmingly a descriptive, rather than a theoretical science. The idea of language universals has thus been a matter of finding shared properties among the highest levels in the organization of language, rather than an attempt to understand the connections of language to other natural sy...

Here is a far-reaching and vitally important question for those seeking to understand the evolution of language: Given a thorough understanding of whatever cognitive processes are relevant to learning, understanding, and producing language, would such an understanding enable us to predict the universal features of language? This question is important because, if met with an affirmative answer, ...

Linguistic areas are geographic regions where languages share characteristics as a result of language contact and not as a consequence of shared inheritance, general linguistic tendencies, linguistic universals, or chance.1 Though there is controversy over the precise set of grammatical characteristics that can spread via language contact (see Campbell, this volume), recognition and study of li...

Current work on universal dependency schemes in NLP does not make reference to the extensive typological research on language universals, but could benefit since many principles are shared between the two enterprises. We propose a revision of the syntactic dependencies in the Universal Dependencies scheme (Nivre et al. [16, 17]) based on four principles derived from contemporary typological the...

The goal of this study is to develop a psychocomputational model of human phoneme acquisition that includes the knowledge of linguistic universals [1, 2, 3] to “teach” Artificial Neural Nets incrementally. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) artificial neural networks are capable to outperform previous recurrent networks on many tasks ranging from grammar recognition to speech [4] and robot control [...

The nineteenth century conception that linguistic structure was to be explained by recourse to the histories of languages was largely abandoned with the rise of synchronic theories in the twentieth century, but has recently returned to prominence. While traditional generative theories of language have tended to attribute cross-linguistic regularities to constraints imposed on the class of possi...

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science pers...