Human language arises from biological evolution, individual learning, and cultural transmission, but the interaction of these three processes has not been widely studied. We set out a formal framework for analyzing cultural transmission, which allows us to investigate how innate learning biases are related to universal properties of language. We show that cultural transmission can magnify weak ...

In my recent book "Tropy i uniwersalia" (Tropes and Universals), I argued that Roman Ingarden’s theory of universals is in fact a kind hidden nominalism. This claim has been subjected to serious criticism by Marek Piwowarczyk, who defended position attempted flesh out the Platonic universals. reply, argue his interpretation Platonism, though it fits Plato’s doctrine, does not correspond ontolog...

In 1969, Berlin and Kay proposed that there exist crosscultural universals in the form of basic color terms. To test this hypothesis, the World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data from 110 non-industrial societies, identifying regularities in the structure of languages with different numbers of terms. This leaves us with the question of where these universals come from. We use a simp...

Evans and Levinson’s (2009) article claims that the assumption of Chomskyan generative linguistics that knowledge of natural language draws on a small inventory of principles with fixed parametric variation (i.e., Universal Grammar) is empirically untenable. We agree that the authors point out prima facie limitations of that approach, and we leave it to others to assess howwell their criticisms...