The “grammar” in Universal Grammar: A biolinguistic clarification

Universal Grammar is a universal grammar

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ULTRA: Universal Grammar as a Universal Parser

A central concern of generative grammar is the relationship between hierarchy and word order, traditionally understood as two dimensions of a single syntactic representation. A related concern is directionality in the grammar. Traditional approaches posit process-neutral grammars, embodying knowledge of language, put to use with infinite facility both for production and comprehension. This has ...

Revisiting Universal Grammar 1

Universal Higher Order Grammar

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...

Phonology without universal grammar

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...