Abstract This article argues that phonological features have no substantive properties, instead, segments are assigned by learning strategies set to the task of devising a computational system for phonology is consistent with requirements UG. I address two problems such substance-free model. The first Card-Grammar problem, which has been suggested argue universal features, on premise that, othe...

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. Cognition, 87, 151–178], we provided crosslinguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument structure is not directly available to learners as a c...

There are many logical possibilities for marking morphological features. However only some of them are attested in languages of the world, and out of them some are more frequent than others. For example, it has been observed (Sapir, 1921; Greenberg, 1957; Hawkins & Gilligan, 1988) that inflectional morphology tends to overwhelmingly involve suffixation rather than prefixation. This paper propos...

A new framework for the study of the human moral faculty is currently receiving much attention: the so-called 'universal moral grammar' framework. It is based on an intriguing analogy, first pointed out by Rawls, between the study of the human moral sense and Chomsky's research program into the human language faculty. To assess UMG, we ask: is moral competence modular? Does it have an underlyin...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...

This paper shows the existence of an equilibrium pragmatic Language with a universal grammar as a coordination device under communication misunderstandings. Such a language plays a key role in achieving efficient outcomes in those Sender-Receiver games where there may exist noisy information transmission. The Language is pragmatic in the sense that the Receiver’ best response depends on the con...

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...

To deal with long-distance dependencies, Applicative Universal Grammar (AUG) proposes a new type of categorial rides, called superposition rules. We compare the AUG rules with the alternative rules of Steedman's Combinatery Categorial Grammar (CCG) (Steedman, 1987, 1988, 1990; Szabolcsi, 1987; Ades and Steedman, 1982). In contrast to Steedtmm's rules, the AUG rules are free from inconsistencies...