The prominent publication of Dunn, Greenhill, Levinson, and Gray's (DGLG) (2011) article in Nature, together with the associated media attention, gives typologists and theoreticians a welcome opportunity to clarify and debate what we mean by universals, and what evidence one should expect to find for or against such universals. In these remarks, I take advantage of this opportunity from a forma...

For better or worse, linguistics is rife with frameworks, each with its own ethos. Two important aspects of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar's are : (1) the search for an explicit and exhaustive account of the intricate syntactic and semantic facts that constitute one's grammar and (2) the hypothesis that general/universal and specific aspects of one's grammar are not qualitatively distinct...

If Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1991, 1993) is correct, Universal Grammar provides a set of universal constraints which are highly general, inherently conflicting, and consequently rampantly violated in the surface forms of languages. A language’s grammar ranks the universal constraints in a dominance hierarchy, higher-ranked constraints taking absolute priority over lower-ranked const...

In classic generative phonology, linguistic competence in the area of sound structure is modeled by a phonological grammar. The theory takes a grammatical form because it posits an inventory of categories (such as features, phonemes, syllables or feet) and a set of principles which specify the well-formed combinations of these categories. In any particular language, a particular set of principl...

Universal Grammar (UG) proposed by Chomsky (1986) has gained a large popularity in linguistics study. The paper firstly illustrates the background and major contents of UG and second language acquisition (SLA). Then it addresses the three hypotheses of UG in SLA, which center on whether adult language learners have access to the principles and parameters of UG in constructing the grammar of a s...

We provide a model that extends the splitmerge framework of Petrov et al. (2006) to jointly learn latent annotations and Tree Substitution Grammars (TSGs). We then conduct a variety of experiments with this model, first inducing grammars on a portion of the Penn Treebank and the Korean Treebank 2.0, and next experimenting with grammar refinement from a single nonterminal and from the Universal ...