0. Introduction The overall aim of this paper is to present a speech act ontology that is motivated by general assumptions about the nature of human language and implicational universals about the grammatical coding of illocutionary force (sentence mood markers). In particular, I want to show five things: First, that the Searlean picture is skewed in that it misrepresents universally attested d...

We train a language-universal dependency parser on a multilingual collection of treebanks. The parsing model uses multilingual word embeddings alongside learned and specified typological information, enabling generalization based on linguistic universals and based on typological similarities. We evaluate our parser’s performance on languages in the training set as well as on the unsupervised sc...

We train one multilingual model for dependency parsing and use it to parse sentences in several languages. The parsing model uses (i) multilingual word clusters and embeddings; (ii) token-level language information; and (iii) language-specific features (finegrained POS tags). This input representation enables the parser not only to parse effectively in multiple languages, but also to generalize...

The causal correlations between human genetic variants and linguistic (typological) features could represent the mechanism required for gradual, accretionary models of language evolution. The causal link is mediated by the process of cultural transmission of language across generations in a population of genetically biased individuals. The particular case of Tone, ASPM and Microcephalin is disc...

After remaining more or less in the background for several decades, the issue of recursion in human languages has returned to the fore. The current, vigorous debate is about not just recursion, but the very idea of linguistic universals as a coherent scientific notion, and the nature of language itself. The prevailing view is that recursion – the ability to produce an unbounded number of well-f...

words: 60 Text words: 967 References words: 450 Total words: 1477 The Neglected Universals: Learnability Constraints and Discourse Cues Heidi Waterfall Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. of Psychology, University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637, USA [email protected] Shimon Edelman Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. ...

The search for linguistic universals has often been frustrating because all it takes to disprove a supposed universal is a single contrary case. In view of this it's not surprising that some linguists have fallen back to positing universal 'tendencies', essentially 'universals' that need not be quite universal and which thus can hardly be disproven. The 'universal condition on preferred syllabl...