This paper uses an atomistic ontology of universals, individuals, and facts to provide a semantics for ramified type theory. It is shown that with some natural constraints on the sort of universals and facts admitted into a model, the axiom of reducibility is made valid.

This paper introduces questions to be discussed in a round-table on "Tone and intonation". Considering the state of the art, we propose the following topics: • Downstep preplanning and downstep patterns • Question prosody and prosodic universals, • Focus prosody and prosodic universals, • "Boundary tones", "intonational tails" and "particles"

We present an approach to grammar induction that utilizes syntactic universals to improve dependency parsing across a range of languages. Our method uses a single set of manually-specified language-independent rules that identify syntactic dependencies between pairs of syntactic categories that commonly occur across languages. During inference of the probabilistic model, we use posterior expect...

Data from lesser-studied languages help to delineate parameters of typological variation. The paper presents experimental work on prosodic marking of information structure in selected African languages. The languages investigated exemplify the cross-linguistic variety found in prosodic focus marking by either lacking marking of information structure by purely prosodic means, or by lowering pitc...

Conceptual Modeling is a discipline of great relevance to several areas in Computer Science. In a series of papers [1,2,3] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underlying upper level ontology, proposed in [4,5], to evaluate the ontological correctness of conceptual models and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of a modeling language (UML) should be used in...

The existence of cross-linguistic universals in color naming is currently contested. Early empirical studies, based principally on languages of industrialized societies, suggested that all languages may draw on a universally shared repertoire of color categories. Recent work, in contrast, based on languages from nonindustrialized societies, has suggested that color categories may not be univers...

PURPOSE To extend formal models of language learnability to applications in clinical treatment of children with functional phonological delays. METHOD The focus of the narrative review is on phonological complexity. This follows from learnability theory, whereby complexity in the linguistic input to children has been shown to trigger language learning. Drawing from the literature, phonologica...

Opposing to the behaviorist approach, the alternative approach proposed by Chomsky believes that language acquisition cannot be accounted for without considering a linguistically specific system of Principles and Parameters which every healthy child is expected to have genetically in his or her mind. A set of absolute Universals, Notions and Principles exist in the UG which do not vary from one...

Spatial cognition is central to human thinking, and spatial language is thus an important area of study, as it may reveal fundamental properties of human thought. Recent research reveals that spatial language is much more divergent across languages than had been thought, suggesting significant cultural patterning of spatial conceptualization. Space can be treated as a complex semantic field wit...

The distinction between endurants and perdurants plays a prominent role in influential top-level ontologies in information science. But how are quantified qualities such as length and mass related to this distinction? In order to answer this question and see its consequences, one has to pay careful attention to the distinctions between: particulars and universals, persisting and instantaneous p...