There are around 5.000 spoken languages of the world today, and they are all different. Thus, natural languages are very diverse. However, most linguists share the view that the languages of the world, and the way they are used in different communities, have a lot in common. The properties that all languages have in common are called language universals. Linguists have claimed of many different...

Philosophers have long debated about two ways of conceiving of universals: as Platonic universals and as Aristotelian universals. Roughly, Aristotelian universals are inherent in the particulars that instantiate them; they can be multiply located (located just where the instances are located), and they exist only if they have at least one instance. Platonic universals, by contrast, are truly ab...

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very ra...

Natural language, as is well known, seems to involve a rather rich ontology. It easily allows for reference to universals (with nominalizations such as honesty) und thus seems to involve a realist ontology, with properties acting as objects. It also allows reference to collections of any sort (with plurals and conjunctive NPs) und thus seems to involve unrestricted composition. In this paper, I...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...

I present the so-called Verb-Object Constraint as a serious proposal for a true linguistic universal. It provides an example of the kind of abstraction in linguistic analysis that seems warranted, of how different languages can confirm such a universal in different ways, and why approaches that avoid all abstractness miss important linguistic generalizations.

Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others ...

Across languages there are certain characteristics which they share. Linguists, trying to explain language universals, have come up with different theories: They argue for (1) the innatedness of general linguistic principles, (2) the communicative functions reflected in linguisitic structure, (3) the psychological demands placed upon language users, or (4) grammar-internal explanations. This pa...