some scholars have argued that there is a negative correlation between the onset age of l2 acquisition and performance on different measures of l2 knowledge. a kind of biological scheduling is assumed to be responsible for this maturational constraint on language development. the present study asks whether and to what extent critical period effects can be found for universal properties of langu...

We examine the class of languages that can be defined entirely in terms of provability in an extension of the sorted type theory (Tyn) by embedding the logic of phonologies, without introduction of special types for syntactic entities. This class is proven to precisely coincide with the class of logically closed languages that may be thought of as functions from expressions to sets of logically...

One of the most astonishing discovery of Chomsky [13] is the universal grammar which is a model of how human language works. The universal grammar is an innate combinatorial system from which every language, French, English, Japanese, can be derived. What is the implication of Chomsky’s universal grammar for grammatical inference? We think it gives a strong intuition for the mathematical modeli...

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the h...

A central concern of generative grammar is the relationship between hierarchy and word order, traditionally understood as two dimensions of a single syntactic representation. A related concern is directionality in the grammar. Traditional approaches posit process-neutral grammars, embodying knowledge of language, put to use with infinite facility both for production and comprehension. This has ...