Quantitative Standards for Absolute Linguistic Universals

Quantitative Standards for Absolute Linguistic Universals

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...

Linguistic diversity and universals

On the question of linguistic universals

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...

Linking Meaning to Language: Linguistic Universals and Variation

To use natural language, speakers must map the participants in events or states in the world onto grammatical roles. There remains considerable disagreement about the nature of these so-called linking rules (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005). In order to probe the nature of linking rules, we investigate verbs of psychological state, which demonstrate complex linking patterns both within and betwee...

Linguistic Intuitions are the Result of Interactions Between Perceptual Processes and Linguistic Universals

We found o direct relationship between voriotion in informants’ grommoticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants’ use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It hos been proproposed that ‘c-command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within-sentence coreference between pronouns and...