In this article, I examine whether the Tractarian objects include universals. suggest that Tractatus does not support a realist view—namely apart from including particulars, also universals—or nominalist view—that is, only particulars. This is because, beyond fact there no standard definition of notions “particulars” and “universals”, term “object” remains indeterminate in Tractatus. contributi...

Human universals--of which hundreds have been identified--consist of those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that, so far as the record has been examined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history. After presenting some of the basic conceptions and problems concerning such universals per se--their kinds and causes and the methodological and disciplina...

Human language is both highly diverse-different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals-and easily learnable. Any language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render human language unique in the biological world. Understanding the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally inte...

Since Greenberg the recognition of linguistic universals has been the backbone of language typology. Earlier Garvin had already divided universals into absolute and potential ones, the former uncontested cornerstones of linguistic theory, the latter commonly accepted generalizations among experienced professionals. The 'universals' to be discussed here are of the latter type: tried and tested p...

the common belief among a great number of linguists and psycholinguists is that the solution to the problem of language acquisition, also called the projection problem or plato’s problem, lies within the prior knowledge. one hypothesis that constitutes the foundation of this belief is that the gap between the child-exposed input (primary data) and the linguistic system (linguistic competence) i...

Recurring traits across languages have been argued to relate directly to constraints imposed by the brain. A particular case is Greenberg's word order universals (Greenberg 1966), which have been argued to reflect the demands of language acquisition (Baker 2001, Chomsky 2010) or of processing sentences (Hawkins 1983, Kirby and Hurford 1997). This paper argues that typological universals are ind...

It is well known that natural languages share certain aspects of their design. For example, across languages, syllables like blif are preferred to lbif. But whether language universals are myths or mentally active constraints-linguistic or otherwise-remains controversial. To address this question, we used fMRI to investigate brain response to four syllable types, arrayed on their linguistic wel...