Drift versus Diachronic Universals

Cue-based Acquisition and Information Structure Drift in Diachronic Language Development

Within a model of language acquisition and change which recognizes the importance of cues and so-called ‘micro-cues’ in the input (e.g. Lightfoot 1999, 2006, Westergaard 2006, 2007), this paper argues that patterns of information structure may be a factor causing word order change. The examples discussed are taken from mixed grammars which allow two subject or object positions, in both historic...

Chemotaxis when Bacteria Remember: Drift versus Diffusion

Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria govern their trajectories by switching between running and tumbling modes as a function of the nutrient concentration they experienced in the past. At short time one observes a drift of the bacterial population, while at long time one observes accumulation in high-nutrient regions. Recent work has viewed chemotaxis as a compromise between drift toward favorab...

produce cultural universals Anna

Looking across human societies reveals regularities in the languages that people speak and the concepts that they use. One explanation that has been proposed for these “cultural universals” is differences in the ease with which people learn particular languages and concepts. A difference in learnability means that languages and concepts possessing a particular property are more likely to be acc...

Language universals at birth.

The evolution of human languages is driven both by primitive biases present in the human sensorimotor systems and by cultural transmission among speakers. However, whether the design of the language faculty is further shaped by linguistic biological biases remains controversial. To address this question, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine whether the brain activity of neonates is sen...

Linguistic diversity and universals