The paper takes a look at the history of the idea of universal grammar and compares it to multilingual grammars, as formalized in the Grammatical Framework, GF. Résumé. L’article jette un coup d’oeil sur l’histoire de l’idée d’une grammaire universelle et fait ensuite une comparaison avec les grammaires multilingues, telles que formalisées dans GF, “Grammatical Framework”.

The perspective of this paper is to compare mathematical models for the evolutionary dynamics of genomes and languages. The quasispecies equation describes the evolution of genetic sequences under the influence of mutation and selection. A central result is an error threshold which specifies the minimum replication accuracy required for maintaining genetic information of a certain length. The l...

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved ...

A computational framework is presented which is used to model the process by which human language learners acquire the syntactic component of their native language. The focus is feasibility | is acquisition possible within a reasonable amount of time and/or with a reasonable amount of work? The approach abstracts away from speciic linguistic descriptions in order to make a `broad-stroke' predic...

Recent demonstrations of statistical learning in infants have reinvigorated the innateness versus learning debate in language acquisition. This article addresses these issues from both computational and developmental perspectives. First, I argue that statistical learning using transitional probabilities cannot reliably segment words when scaled to a realistic setting (e.g. child-directed Englis...

Reading has universal properties that can be seen across the world’s writing systems. The most important one is the universal language constraint: All writing systems represent spoken languages, a universal with consequences for reading processes. These consequences are seen most clearly at the broad principle level: the principle that reading universally requires the reader to make links to la...

One important issue in current language acquisition research is whether the of a second fundamentally different from that first language. Researchers approaching (SLA) linguistic perspective often relate this to availability Universal Grammar acquisition. The main focus paper examine role and what extent it plays process. To illustrate this, four access hypotheses or theories were given.
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The German Grammar group develops a fully formalized and computer-processable set of grammars that share a set of constraints, that is, they have a common core (see also Müller, 2013 for an overview). Some very general con-straints hold for all grammars, some for subgroups of languages. Currently we work on: 1. German (Germanic, SFB 632, A6, Müller, 2007; Müller and Ørsnes, 2011), 2. Danish (Ge...

Much has been written about the unlikelihood of innate, syntax-specific, universal knowledge of language (Universal Grammar) on the grounds that it is biologically implausible, unresponsive to cross-linguistic facts, theoretically inelegant, and implausible and unnecessary from the perspective of language acquisition. While relevant, much of this discussion fails to address the sorts of facts t...

Diversity of language is a key part of our understanding of natural languages now and from the past. This diversity goes hand in hand with language change. Change is pervasive at every linguistic level. However, the space of existing languages does not appear to be unconstrained. In the modern generative tradition, this is governed by Universal Grammar (UG) (see, for example, Kroch (2000)). A n...