Across languages there are certain characteristics which they share. Linguists, trying to explain language universals, have come up with different theories: They argue for (1) the innatedness of general linguistic principles, (2) the communicative functions reflected in linguisitic structure, (3) the psychological demands placed upon language users, or (4) grammar-internal explanations. This pa...

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, w...

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very ra...

Research in quantitative evolutionary genomics and systems biology led to the discovery of several universal regularities connecting genomic and molecular phenomic variables. These universals include the log-normal distribution of the evolutionary rates of orthologous genes; the power law-like distributions of paralogous family size and node degree in various biological networks; the negative c...

Abstract To be an Aristotelian about universals is to hold that depend for their existence on exemplifiers. An argument against Aristotelianism has recently been put forward by Costa the effect a contradiction follows from assuming certain formulation of together with some highly plausible principles governing notions employed in formulation. In this paper, we provide different ways articulatin...

to analyze the dialectical reasoning, in topics, aristotle reduces any dialectical proposition to a subject which is ‘species’ and a predicate which is either ‘definition’ , ‘genus’, (‘difference’,) ‘property’, or ‘accident’, and then he says that the ten categories provide the matters of these predicables. porphyry in isagoge substitutes the ‘species’ for the ‘definition’ and exhibites these f...

The problem of universals remains a philosophical theme not only in ontology but also epistemology. In Husserl, there are particular universals, the noematic ‘X’, identical, and stricto sensu, atemporal universal names. this paper, I present as it is analyzed by Husserl Ideas I. first section, describe trajectory to highlighting parallelism between noese noema. second draw reflection on philoso...

Human language is both highly diverse-different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals-and easily learnable. Any language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render human language unique in the biological world. Understanding the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally inte...