The concept of marking was discovered in phonology by Trubetzkoy and generalized to morphology and grammar by Jakobson. In a fundamental application to anthropology, Greenberg integrated a generalized concept of marking into a cognitivelinguistic theory of kinship universals. Greenberg’s theory is important for three reasons: (1) it leads to the discovery and explanation of cross-cultural unive...

This study is to examine if typological universals built upon primary languages are applicable to interlanguage data in SLA. Implicational universal is considered the classic example of a typological universal by Croft (2003). Thus, the Interlanguage Structural Conformity Hypothesis, which consists of two implicational universals proposed by Eckman (1991), were tested against data from an inter...

Universals of shamanism reflect innate brain processes and representational systems and fundamental aspects of consciousness. Shamanic universals involve psychophysiological dynamics of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and visionary experiences, metaphoric representations produced through integration of innate representational modules, and rituals that produce psychophysiological healing ...

In a recent cross-cultural study with participants from an autochthonous African population (Mafa) and Western participants, it was shown that the recognition of several emotional expressions (happy, sad, fearful) in music are likely to be music universals [1]. The Mafa listeners (who were naïve to the Western music) were quite successful at recognizing the emotional expressions in the Western ...

The behavior of speech sounds involves a large number of “natural”, panchronic processes that take place at different points in time and space, in unrelated languages. More or less subtle synchronic, dialectal, stylistic, or allophonic variations may progressively become full-fledged sound changes. An overview of these sound changes brings out preferences for “natural” sounds, that are easier t...

Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the ...

The question “What is category theory” is approached by focusing on universal mapping properties and adjoint functors. Category theory organizes mathematics using morphisms that transmit structure and determination. Structures of mathematical interest are usually characterized by some universal mapping property so the general thesis is that category theory is about determination through univers...

Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A computational model has recently shown how this could be the case, focusing on the paradigmatic example of the universal properties of colour naming patterns, and...

The form of rules in combinatory categorial grammars (CCG) is constrained by three principles, called "adjacency", "consistency" and "inheritance". These principles have been claimed elsewhere to constrain the combinatory rules of composition and type raising in such a way as to make certain linguistic universals concerning word order under coordination follow immediately. The present paper sho...