This paper uses an atomistic ontology of universals, individuals, and facts to provide a semantics for ramified type theory. It is shown that with some natural constraints on the sort of universals and facts admitted into a model, the axiom of reducibility is made valid.

This paper introduces questions to be discussed in a round-table on "Tone and intonation". Considering the state of the art, we propose the following topics: • Downstep preplanning and downstep patterns • Question prosody and prosodic universals, • Focus prosody and prosodic universals, • "Boundary tones", "intonational tails" and "particles"

The distinction between endurants and perdurants plays a prominent role in influential top-level ontologies in information science. But how are quantified qualities such as length and mass related to this distinction? In order to answer this question and see its consequences, one has to pay careful attention to the distinctions between: particulars and universals, persisting and instantaneous p...

In this paper, we present a succinct formalisation of the main categories of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by summarising and simplifying a fragment of the version of [Gui05]. In this version, we show that the use first-order modal logic with no higher-order constructs suffices for many modelling tasks. We focus here on the case of universals. We slightly modify the original version o...

Typological universals are skewed distributional patterns whereby languages recurrently display certain grammatical as opposed to others. Explanations for these usually based on their synchronic properties, not actual diachronic processes that shape the pattern cross-linguistically. The paper discusses evidence about origins of some typological pertaining word order and aspect/tense conditioned...

This paper develops the concept of word order universals based on a data analysis Universal Dependencies project, which proposes treebanks more than 90 languages encoded with same annotation scheme. The nature we work allows us to extract rich details for testing well-known typological implicational and, further, explore new kinds that call quantitative universals. We show how such are in essen...