Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science pers...

This thesis introduces the subject of language evolution and provides insights into the evolution of several syntactic devices by modeling the acquisition of artificial languages by humans and neural networks. Previous work has shown that some linguistic universals can be learned by sequential-learning devices with no languagespecific biases (e.g., Ellefson & Christiansen, 2000; Christiansen & ...

In my recent book "Tropy i uniwersalia" (Tropes and Universals), I argued that Roman Ingarden’s theory of universals is in fact a kind hidden nominalism. This claim has been subjected to serious criticism by Marek Piwowarczyk, who defended position attempted flesh out the Platonic universals. reply, argue his interpretation Platonism, though it fits Plato’s doctrine, does not correspond ontolog...

words: 60 Text words: 967 References words: 450 Total words: 1477 The Neglected Universals: Learnability Constraints and Discourse Cues Heidi Waterfall Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. of Psychology, University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637, USA [email protected] Shimon Edelman Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA and Dept. ...

We describe a discovery program, called UNIVAUTO (UNIVersals AUthoringTOol), whose domain of application is the study of language universals, a classic trend in contemporary linguistics. Accepting as input information about languages, presented in terms of feature-values, the discoveries of another human agent arising from the same data, as well as some additional data, the program discovers th...