Anybody’s search for language universals will depend on certain assumptions that are not themselves scientific in the strict sense of the empirical sciences, since they cannot be subjected to experimental testing. These basic assumptions are ontological, as they imply convictions of how those universals might exist, and they are epistemological because their mode of existence will determine how...

This article offers a general discussion of the concept of universals in linguistics (and in general), spelling out different ways of understanding claims to universality and connecting such claims to other (often familiar) related distinctions, terminology and approaches such as competence and performance or I-language and E-language, evolutionary explanations, deep and surface universals, rat...

Music has been called "the universal language of mankind." Although contemporary theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such universals has been disputed for decades and has never been empirically demonstrated. Here we combine a music-classification scheme with statistical analyses, including phylogenetic comparative methods, to examine a well-samp...

We describe a discovery program, called UNIVAUTO (UNIVersals AUthoringTOol), whose domain of application is the study of language universals, a classic trend in contemporary linguistics. Accepting as input information about languages, presented in terms of feature-values, the discoveries of another human agent arising from the same data, as well as some additional data, the program discovers th...

Human societies are remarkably diverse but this diversity is not limitless. Human cultural and linguistic variation is patterned and the spectrum of variation is not as wide as the “ethnographic hyperspace” we could think of. There are phenomena regularly found in all human cultures. Among the better known examples out of hundreds of universals are ethnocentrism, incest avoidance and social rec...

A computational model of emergent syllable systems is developed based on a set of functional constraints on syllable systems and the assumption that language structure emerges through cumulative change over time. The constraints were derived from general communicative factors as well as from the phonetic principles of perceptual distinctiveness and articulatory ease. Through evolutionary optimi...

In a companion paper ([14]), I describe UNIVAUTO (UNIVersals AUthoring TOol), a linguistic discovery program that uncovers language universals and can write a report in English on its discoveries. In this contribution, the system is evaluated along a number of parameters that have been suggested in the literature as necessary ingredients of a successful discovery program. These parameters inclu...

This paper examines the implications of connectionist models of cognition for second language theory. Connectionism offers a challenge to the symbolic models which dominate cognitive science. In connectionist models all knowledge is embodied in a network of simple processing units joined by connections which are strengthened or weakened in response to regularities in input patterns. These model...