The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such domain is morality. Could there be universal generative moral grammar? More specifically, might it be useful to moral theory to develop an explicit...

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is generally construed as a fully lexicalized formalism, where all grammars use one and the same universal set of rules, and crosslinguistic variation is isolated in the lexicon. In this paper, we show that the weak generative capacity of this ‘pure’ form of CCG is strictly smaller than that of CCG with grammar-specific rules, and of other mildly context-sen...

A central component of Kallmeyer and Joshi 2003 is the idea that the contribution of a quantifier is separated into a scope and a predicate argument part. Quantified NPs are analyzed as multi-component TAGs, where the scope part of the quantifier introduces the proposition containing the quantifier, and the predicate-argument part introduces the restrictive clause. This paper shows that this as...

This paper presents an analysis of the English instrumental markers with and 15 verbal use. As with other thematic roles, the semantic generalizations encoded by the role Instrument have been difficult to precisely characterize. In this study, we analyze the distinct semantic contributions of with and use, illuminating several properties of instrumental meaning. In particular, use specifies tha...

Universal Grammar (UG) theory has been one of the most important research topics in linguistics since introduced five decades ago. UG specifies the restricted set of languages learnable by human brain, and thus, many researchers believe in its biological roots. Numerous empirical studies of neurobiological and cognitive functions of the human brain, and of many natural languages, have been cond...

This paper reports the findings from an interconnected set of experiments designed to assess children’s knowledge of the semantic interactions between negation and quantified NPs. Our main finding is that young children, unlike adults, systematically interpret these elements on the basis of their position in overt syntax. We argue that this observation can be derived from an interplay between f...

There are currently two theories about how children acquire a language. The first is generative grammar, according to which all human children innately possess a universal grammar, abstract enough to structure any language of the world. Acquisition then consists of two processes: (1) acquiring all the words, idioms, and quirky constructions of the particular language being learned (by ‘normal’ ...

Everett (2016b) criticizes The Phonological Mind thesis (Berent, 2013a,b) on logical, methodological and empirical grounds. Most of Everett's concerns are directed toward the hypothesis that the phonological grammar is constrained by universal grammatical (UG) principles. Contrary to Everett's logical challenges, here I show that the UG hypothesis is readily falsifiable, that universality is no...

In this paper, we propose Objects, Containers, Gestures, and Manipulations (OCGM, pronounced like Occam’s Razor) as universal foundational metaphors of Natural User Interfaces. We compare OCGM to existing paradigms using SRK behavior classification and early childhood cognitive development, and justify the “universal” and “foundational” descriptors based upon cognitive linguistics and universal...

The purpose of this work is to investigate the process of grammatical acquisition from data. In order to do that, a computational learning system is used, composed of a Universal Grammar with associated parameters, and a learning algorithm, following the Principles and Parameters Theory. The Universal Grammar is implemented as a Unification-Based Generalised Categorial Grammar, embedded in a de...