In this paper, we present a succinct formalisation of the main categories of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by summarising and simplifying a fragment of the version of [Gui05]. In this version, we show that the use first-order modal logic with no higher-order constructs suffices for many modelling tasks. We focus here on the case of universals. We slightly modify the original version o...

e object of inquiry in Linguistics is the human ability to acquire and use a natural language, and the goal of linguistic theory is an explicit characterization of that ability. Looking at the communicative abilities of other species, it becomes clear that our linguistic ability is specific to our species, undoubtedly a product of our biology. But how do we go about determining the specifics of...

Typological universals are skewed distributional patterns whereby languages recurrently display certain grammatical as opposed to others. Explanations for these usually based on their synchronic properties, not actual diachronic processes that shape the pattern cross-linguistically. The paper discusses evidence about origins of some typological pertaining word order and aspect/tense conditioned...

Models of language evolution have demonstrated how aspects of human language, such as compositionality, can arise in populations of interacting agents. This paper analyzes how languages change as the result of a particular form of interaction: agents learning from one another. We show that, when the learners are rational Bayesian agents, this process of iterated learning converges to the prior ...

This paper develops the concept of word order universals based on a data analysis Universal Dependencies project, which proposes treebanks more than 90 languages encoded with same annotation scheme. The nature we work allows us to extract rich details for testing well-known typological implicational and, further, explore new kinds that call quantitative universals. We show how such are in essen...

The work is devoted to the memory of a prominent scientist, philologist, founder Odesa onomastic school, honoured worker science and technology Ukraine, corresponding member National Academy Sciences academician Sciences, professor Yuriy Karpenko his study topical issue origin development Ukrainian language, chronological stages division history literary language. purpose research present conce...