Most work in ‘evolutionary linguistics’ seeks to motivate the emergence of linguistic universals. Although the search for universals never played a major role in semantics, a number of such universals have been proposed concerning connectives, property and preposition denoting expressions, and quantifiers. In this paper we suggest some evolutionary motivations for these proposed universals usin...

This thesis introduces the subject of language evolution and provides insights into the evolution of several syntactic devices by modeling the acquisition of artificial languages by humans and neural networks. Previous work has shown that some linguistic universals can be learned by sequential-learning devices with no languagespecific biases (e.g., Ellefson & Christiansen, 2000; Christiansen & ...

Chomsky (1965; 1986) has long stressed the significance of the fact that children can acquire any human language. This linguistic phenomenon is a central motivation in the search for language universals. The claims of generative grammar underline the importance of documenting the full range of language diversity while typologically distinct languages still exist. Such documentation is necessary...

This article lays out an approach that combines a formal-generative perspective on language, including tolerance of abstract analyses, with a typological focus on comparing unrelated languages from around the world. It argues that this can be a powerful combination for discovering linguistic universals and patterns in linguistic variation that are not detected by other means.

Recursive schemes over inductive data structures have been recognized as categorytheoretic universals, yielding a handful of equational laws for program construction and transformation. This paper introduces the implementation of such recursion patterns as type parametric, or polytypic, functionals in the Camila prototyping language. Several examples are discussed.

The article is devoted to linguistic universals as one of the most important term typology and foundation comparative research.
 Purpose. analysis aimed at tracing history emergence formation universals, well analyzing available definitions classifications on basis synthesis views famous linguists authors’ own observations, determining place verbal constructions with an aspectual meaning i...

In the past fifteen years or so there has been a lot of attention paid to theories of “sparse” universals, particularly because of the work of D. M. Armstrong. These theories are of particular interest to those of us concerned with the distinction between natural and non-natural properties, since, as David Lewis has observed, it seems possible to analyze naturalness in terms of sparse universal...

David Armstrong believes in universals. Once universals are accepted, it must also be accepted that they resemble one another to various degrees. Colors, for instance, fall into a complicated multidimensional resemblanceorder. Armstrong claims that all universals are complex universals, and that they resemble one another insofar as they have common universal constituents. Armstrong’s reductive ...

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversat...