There are around 5.000 spoken languages of the world today, and they are all different. Thus, natural languages are very diverse. However, most linguists share the view that the languages of the world, and the way they are used in different communities, have a lot in common. The properties that all languages have in common are called language universals. Linguists have claimed of many different...

This paper uses an atomistic ontology of universals, individuals, and facts to provide a semantics for ramified type theory. It is shown that with some natural constraints on the sort of universals and facts admitted into a model, the axiom of reducibility is made valid.

The biases of individual language learners act to determine the learnability and cultural stability of languages: learners come to the language learning task with biases which make certain linguistic systems easier to acquire than others. These biases are repeatedly applied during the process of language transmission, and consequently should effect the types of languages we see in human populat...

This paper introduces questions to be discussed in a round-table on "Tone and intonation". Considering the state of the art, we propose the following topics: • Downstep preplanning and downstep patterns • Question prosody and prosodic universals, • Focus prosody and prosodic universals, • "Boundary tones", "intonational tails" and "particles"

Literary scholars and psychologists have long remarked striking similarities in the depiction of male heroes in the world's folk tale traditions. The best-known attempt to document and explain these similarities is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1936). Campbell's work differs in detail from other prominent attempts to define universal features of heroes, however its grand the...

The distinction between endurants and perdurants plays a prominent role in influential top-level ontologies in information science. But how are quantified qualities such as length and mass related to this distinction? In order to answer this question and see its consequences, one has to pay careful attention to the distinctions between: particulars and universals, persisting and instantaneous p...

In this paper, we present a succinct formalisation of the main categories of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by summarising and simplifying a fragment of the version of [Gui05]. In this version, we show that the use first-order modal logic with no higher-order constructs suffices for many modelling tasks. We focus here on the case of universals. We slightly modify the original version o...

Typological universals are skewed distributional patterns whereby languages recurrently display certain grammatical as opposed to others. Explanations for these usually based on their synchronic properties, not actual diachronic processes that shape the pattern cross-linguistically. The paper discusses evidence about origins of some typological pertaining word order and aspect/tense conditioned...