In the sound systems of human languages remarkable universals are found. These universals can be explained by innate mechanisms, or by their function in human speech. This paper presents a functional explanation of certain universals of vowel systems using Alife-techniques. It is based on language-like interactions between members of a population of individual agents. The agents start out empty...

The functional approach to typology often appeals to processing pressures in order to explain universals. This paper examines a case where the match between a processing asymmetry and a typological asymmetry is not one-to-one — a case where the functional approach appears to fail. For a particular typology of relative clauses, the psycholinguistic literature suggests two asymmetries: accessibil...

Human languages vary in many ways, but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the...

Research in Optimality Theoretic syntax tends to focus on language universals and the prediction of systematic language-particular properties by means of constraint interaction, often appealing to the principle of Richness of the Base. However, this has left the role and formal status of the lexicon in such models largely uninvestig-

Every linguist is struck by similarities among even the most different and most culturally isolated human languages. It is natural to assume that some of these common properties, these language universals, might reflect something about the way people can learn and use languages. In some relevant sense, some of these properties may arise and be maintained even in culturally isolated languages be...

This paper reviews an approach to the enterprise of paring away universals of attested languages to reveal the essential universals that require their own explanation. An example, discussed at this conference, is the long-standing puzzle presented by the Extended Projection Principle (EPP, Chomsky 1981). I am suggesting an explanation for the EPP based on the learner’s need for constructions to...