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This paper argues against the hypothesis of a "phonological mind" advanced by Berent. It establishes that there is no evidence that phonology is innate and that, in fact, the simplest hypothesis seems to be that phonology is learned like other human abilities. Moreover, the paper fleshes out the original claim of Philip Lieberman that Universal Grammar predicts that not everyone should be able ...

One of Greenberg’s claims concerning the appearance of numerals as modifiers concerns the order of the elements, suggesting that post-nominal numerals are “favored in indefinite and approximate constructions”. Examining a small but representative body of data from a variety of languages, and one of the common grammaticalisation targets of singular numerals, the indefinite article, we conclude t...

The idea of Universal Grammar (UG) as the hypothetical linguistic structure shared by all human languages harkens back at least to the 13th century. The best known modern elaborations of the idea are due to Chomsky. Following a devastating critique from theoretical, typological and field linguistics, these elaborations, the idea of UG itself and the more general idea of language universals stan...

To deal with long-distance dependencies, Applicative Universal Grammar (AUG) proposes a new type of categorial rides, called superposition rules. We compare the AUG rules with the alternative rules of Steedman's Combinatery Categorial Grammar (CCG) (Steedman, 1987, 1988, 1990; Szabolcsi, 1987; Ades and Steedman, 1982). In contrast to Steedtmm's rules, the AUG rules are free from inconsistencies...

This paper shows the existence of an equilibrium pragmatic Language with a universal grammar as a coordination device under communication misunderstandings. Such a language plays a key role in achieving efficient outcomes in those Sender-Receiver games where there may exist noisy information transmission. The Language is pragmatic in the sense that the Receiver’ best response depends on the con...

Abstract This article argues that phonological features have no substantive properties, instead, segments are assigned by learning strategies set to the task of devising a computational system for phonology is consistent with requirements UG. I address two problems such substance-free model. The first Card-Grammar problem, which has been suggested argue universal features, on premise that, othe...

The alignment problem for synchronous grammars in its unrestricted form, i.e. whether for a grammar and a string pair the grammar induces an alignment of the two strings, reduces to the universal recognition problem, but restrictions may be imposed on the alignment sought, e.g. alignments may be 1 : 1, island-free or sure-possible sorted. The complexities of 15 restricted alignment problems in ...