There is considerable variation across the languages of the world, nonetheless it is possible to discern common patterns in how languages are structured and used. The underlying source of this variation as well as the nature of crosslinguistic universals is the focus of much debate across different areas of linguistics. Some linguists suggest that language universals derive from the inner worki...

1. Introduction In this paper it will be argued that a principle of information structure provided by Universal Grammar (UG) may interact with input in the acquisition of word order. In a study which investigates three children from the age of approximately 1;9 to 3 acquiring a Northern dialect of Norwegian, it has previously been shown that word order patterns in certain types of wh-questions ...

Stephen Crain (C) & Rosalind Thornton (T) have garnered a welldeserved reputation for their unwavering commitment to language learnability as a constraint not only on theories of child language and language development but also on experimental design and the interpretation of experimental findings. In his well-known defense of children’s early knowledge of syntactic constraints, Crain (1991) ar...

We examine the class of languages that can be defined entirely in terms of provability in an extension of the sorted type theory (Tyn) by embedding the logic of phonologies, without introduction of special types for syntactic entities. This class is proven to precisely coincide with the class of logically closed languages that may be thought of as functions from expressions to sets of logically...

One of the most astonishing discovery of Chomsky [13] is the universal grammar which is a model of how human language works. The universal grammar is an innate combinatorial system from which every language, French, English, Japanese, can be derived. What is the implication of Chomsky’s universal grammar for grammatical inference? We think it gives a strong intuition for the mathematical modeli...

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the h...