This collection of articles and review essays, including many hard to find pieces, comprises the most important and fundamental studies of Indian logic and linguistics ever undertaken. Frits Staal is concerned with four basic questions: Are there universals of logic that transcend culture and time? Are there universals of language and linguistics? What is the nature of Indian logic? And what is the nature of Indian linguistics? By addressing these questions, Staal demonstrates that, contrary to (...) the general assumption among Western philosophers, the classical philosophers of India were rationalists, attentive to arguments. They were in this respect unlike contemporary Western thinkers inspired by existentialism or hermeneutics, and like the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and many medieval European schoolmen, only--as Staal says--more so. Universals establishes that Asia's contributions are not only compatible with what has been produced in the West, but a necessary ingredient and an essential component of any future human science. (shrink)

Record of papers given at a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin, April 1967; includes; C.J. Fillmore - The case for case; E. Bach - Nouns and noun phrases; J.D. McCawley - The role of semantics in a grammar; P. Kiparsky Linguistic universals and linguistic change.

We found a direct relationship between variation in informants' grammaticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants' use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It has been proproposed that ‘c‐command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within‐sentence coreference between pronouns and noun antecedents. The relative height of the pronoun and the noun in the phrase structure hierarchy determines whether the c‐command constraint blocks coreference: Coreference is allowed only when the complement (...) structure containing the noun is attached higher than the pronoun. We collected informants' judgments on pronoun‐noun coreference in which the noun antecedent was contained in a complement structure dominated by either the Sentence‐node (S‐node) (higher than the pronoun) or the Verb‐phrase‐node (VP‐node) (not higher than the pronoun). We also assessed each informant's perceptual clause‐closure tendency using an auditory word‐monitor paradigm. Informants who strongly segmented clauses in the perceptual task did not differentiate between an S‐ and VP‐attachment of sentence complements, as revealed in their coreference judgments, but rather appeared to attach all sentence complements to the S‐node. Informants with relatively weak perceptual segmentation differentiated their coreference judgments according to the node attachment of the complement structure. These results indicate that the linguistic universal controlling within‐sentence coreference applies to the perceptually available structure for a sequence, not to its pure linguistic structure. Hence, linguistic intuitions result from the interaction of three independent faculties: language‐specific knowledge, perceptual processes, and linguistic universals. (shrink)

Saunders and van Brakel's observation that “linguistic evidence provides no grounds for the universality of basic color categories” also applies to the concept of “colour” itself. The language of “seeing” is rooted in human experience, and its basic frame of reference is provided by the universal rhythm of “light” days and “dark” nights and by the fundamental and visually salient features of human environment: the sky, the sun, vegetation, fire, the sea, the naked earth.

The author considers a problem of understanding. He claims that we understand texts, cultural objects rather than a man. He considers understanding as a process of interpretation of linguistic expressions and cultural objects. The author observes two sides of the meaning of linguistic expressions: a general (or social) one, which is common in a certain language community, and a personal one, which defines personal understanding. It is argued that mutual understanding is possible only on the stage of general meaning. However, (...) the exchange of personal meanings is a very sophisticated process. (shrink)

Children's reading and spelling errors show that orthographic learning involves complex interactions with phonology, morphology, and meaning throughout development. Even young children seek to make their visual word recognition strategies linguistically coherent. Orthographic knowledge gained through spelling affects reading, and vice versa. Developmental data support Frost's claim that letter-coding flexibility reflects the optimization of encoding resources in a highly developed system.

IT IS ARGUED THAT LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS DOES NOT DEAL WITH\nTHE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS IN A SATISFACTORY WAY. THE\nCONTRIBUTIONS OF RYLE, WITTGENSTEIN AND PEARS ARE\nCONSIDERED. IT IS HELD THAT THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS IS A\nGENUINE METAPHYSICAL PROBLEM AND DOES NOT ADMIT OF BEING\nDISPOSED OF BY CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS. MOREOVER, THE FAILURE\nOF ATTEMPTS BY LINGUISTIC ANALYSTS HERE MUST CAST DOUBT ON\nTHE SOUNDNESS OF THEIR BOLD ANTIMETAPHYSICAL CLAIMS. IT IS\nCONCLUDED THAT THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS IS NOT PRIMARILY\nONE OF NAMING, BUT RATHER (...) OF RESEMBLANCES. (STAFF). (shrink)

Preconference version of paper for the 17th International Congress of Linguists in Prague, July, 2003.

For the last decade and more Noam Chomsky has been elaborating a skein of doctrines about language learning, linguistic universals, Empiricism and innate cognitive mechanisms. My aim in this paper is to pull apart some of the claims that Chomsky often defends collectively. In particular, I want to dissect out some contentions about the existence of linguistic universals. I shall argue that these claims, while they may be true, are logically independent from a cluster of claims Chomsky makes (...) about Empiricism, language learning and innate cognitive mechanisms. The latter claims are, on my view, significantly more plausible than the former. Failure to note the logical space between the two has had lamentable consequences both for Chomsky and for his critics. Chomsky has been rather too ready to accept the existence of linguistic universals, and in arguing that one or another specific feature of a grammar is universal, he has consistently invoked an argument form of dubious merit. The critics, for their part, have sometimes argued against Chomsky's attack on Empiricist learning theories by criticizing Chomsky's views on language universals. If, as I shall maintain, the two positions are quite independent, then the critics' skepticism about linguistic universals is largely irrelevant to the Chomskian critique of Empiricist theories of learning. (shrink)

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very rarely be able to statistically justify absolute, inviolable patterns in language. We formalize two statistical methods—frequentist and Bayesian—and show that in both (...) it is possible to find strict linguistic universals, but that the numbers of independent languages necessary to do so is generally unachievable. This suggests that methods other than typological statistics are necessary to establish absolute properties of human language, and thus that many of the purported universals in linguistics have not received sufficient empirical justification. (shrink)

According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology—the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world's languages—and can be probed with artificial grammar experiments on child and adult learners. Beginning with a widely successful approach to typology (Optimality Theory), and adapting techniques from computational approaches to statistical learning, we develop a Bayesian model of cognitive biases and show that it accounts for the detailed pattern of results of artificial (...) grammar experiments on noun-phrase word order (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). Our proposal has several novel properties that distinguish it from prior work in the domains of linguistic theory, computational cognitive science, and machine learning. This study illustrates how ideas from these domains can be synthesized into a model of language learning in which biases range in strength from hard (absolute) to soft (statistical), and in which language-specific and domain-general biases combine to account for data from the macro-level scale of typological distribution to the micro-level scale of learning by individuals. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that followImai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of labelsper (...) se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

Etude de la théorie de la supposition développée par Saint Thomas d'Aquin dans le cadre de ses réflexions sur les universaux. Distinguant les différents types de supposition et leur relation avec la signification, l'A. montre que la théorie thomiste de la supposition illustre la position théologique et métaphysique de Saint Thomas concernant l'unité du divin.

My goal in this paper is to defend the plausibility of a particular version of collectivism – understood as the evolutionary claim that individual-level cognition is systematically biased in favor of aggregate-level regularities – in the domain of language. Chomsky's (1986) methodological promotion of I-language (speaker-internal knowledge) and the corresponding demotion of E-language (aggregate output of a population of speakers) has led mainstream cognitive science to view language essentially as a property of individual minds/brains whose evolution is best explained as (...) a result of the natural selection of an innate language faculty (Pinker 1994). Such a framework is largely oblivious to the linguistic dynamics arising from iterated learning, i.e. the fact that linguistic information must be periodically mapped from its I-linguistic into its E-linguistic medium and back in order to persist over time. Recent expression/induction models of language evolution, which are heavily inspired by the simulation-based methodology of Artificial Life, suggest that linguistic universals, such as compositional and recursive structure, can emerge from cultural selection alone (Brighton et al. 2005). I will conclude that there is both a biological and a cultural route towards collectivism. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of (...) labels per se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

Jones recognizes the existence of “primitives of conceptual structures,” out of which “local representations of kinship are constructed.” NSM semantics has identified these primitives through a cross-linguistic search for lexical universals (“NSM” stands for Natural Semantic Metalanguage and also for the corresponding linguistic theory). These empirical universals provide, I argue, a better bridge between cognitive anthropology and evolutionary psychology than the abstract constructs of OT, with dubious claim to conceptual reality.

Conceptual primitives and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory which Anna Wierzbicka has been developing for many years. Semantics: Primes and Universals is a major synthesis of her work, presenting a full and systematic exposition of that theory in a non-technical and readable way. It delineates a full set of universal concepts, as they have emerged from large-scale investigations across a wide range of languages undertaken by the author and her colleagues. On the basis of (...) empirical cross-linguistic studies it vindicates the old notion of the "psychic unity of mankind", while at the same time offering a framework for the rigorous description of different languages and cultures. (shrink)

The author singles out the functions of understanding and interpretation in terms of their object – nature, culture or the life world of man. The critical arguments are proposed against the strict separation of understanding and interpreting by A. L. Nikiforov. The author provides examples of paradoxes and other difficulties arising from their juxtaposition. He also formulates objections against the limited interpretation of linguistic universals as conceptual constructs. He proposes a hypothesis on the genesis of some empirical universals (...) in science (chemical element by R. Boyle). Finally, he suggests the idea of a complex structure of language universals to be discovered by philosophical analysis. (shrink)

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, we discuss a number of promising constraints, most of which require further empirical testing and/or refinement. In the realm of (...) pragmatics, we predict that Gricean mechanisms are universal, but suggest that the precise nature of presuppositions may be subject to cross-linguistic variation. Finally, we follow E.L. Keenan in concluding that the overarching universal of effability or translatability between languages cannot be upheld in its strongest form. A recurring theme throughout this survey is how much work still remains to be done in the relatively young field of cross-linguistic formal semantics. (shrink)

Presented here is an argument for the existence of universals. Like Church's translation- test argument, the argument turns on considerations from intensional logic. But whereas Church's argument turns on the fine-grained informational content of intensional sentences, this argument turns on the distinctive logical features of 'that'-clauses embedded within modal contexts. And unlike Church's argument, this argument applies against truth-conditions nominalism and also against conceptualism and in re realism. So if the argument is successful, it serves as a defense of (...) full ante rem realism. The argument emphasizes the need for a unified treatment of intensional statements -- modal statements as well as statements of assertion and belief. The larger philosophical moral will be that ante rem universals are uniquely suited to carry a certain kind of modal information. Linguistic entities, mind-dependent universals, and instance-dependent universals are incapable of serving that function. (shrink)

Word Order Universals is a detailed account of word order universals and their role in theories of historical change. The starting point is the Greenberg data set, which is comprised of a sample of 142 languages for certain limited co-occurrences of basic word orders, and a 30-language sample for more detailed information. In the Language Index, the 142 have been expanded to some 350 languages. Using the original Greenberg samples and the Expanded Sample, an alternative set of descriptive (...) word order statements is provided. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with an introduction to the theory of word order universals, encompassing topics such as word order variation across languages and theories of universal grammar. The reader is then introduced to the work of Joseph Greenberg and Theo Vennemann on word order universals; implicational universals in Greenberg's data and the Expanded Sample; and the predictions made by implicational and distributional universals for word order change. Reformulated universals for historical reconstruction are also discussed, along with some laws of reconstruction derived from synchronic universals. The final chapter is devoted to the Expanded Sample, with particular reference to its quantities as well as its typological and genetic classification. This monograph will be a useful resource for specialists in grammar and linguistics. (shrink)

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 perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and (...) unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)

Dietmar Zaefferer Institutfiir Deutsche Philologie Universitdt Munchen Schellingstr. 3 D-8000 Munchen 40 Semantic universals are the properties the ...

Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) argument rests on an assumption that convergent cultural evolution can produce similar (complex) behaviours in isolated populations. In this commentary, I describe how experiments recently carried out by Caldwell and colleagues can contribute to the understanding of such phenomena.

Generative linguistics' search for linguistic universals (1) is not comparable to the vague explanatory suggestions of the article; (2) clearly merits a more central place than linguistic typology in cognitive science; (3) is fundamentally untouched by the article's empirical arguments; (4) best explains the important facts of linguistic diversity; and (5) illuminates the dominant component of language's nature: biology.

If the truth of a given sentence, ‘P’ depends upon a certain non-linguistic fact, P then, how is the P without inverted commas involved in the statement, “ ‘P’ is true when P“? How is ‘P’ related to P? My answer suggests that any discussion of these questions leads inevitably to the ancient problem of particulars and universals.

This writing is part of a body of reflections about the ‘researching programs’ and ‘categories’ used in philosophy, philology and linguistics to explain human language. Within this framework, several categories like Modell, Vorbild and Paradigm are covered from a descriptive sense according to the ‘Wittgenstein’ research program. From Russell’s conception of language, there is a treatment to the prescriptive aspects of Plato’s ideas and their relation to universals. Then, the universal category in the predicament act and the denotation (...) act are linked proposing their relation with notions such as ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’. Therefore some concerns, shared by Russell and Wittgenstein about a philosophical grammar, are pointed out for the expression of human understanding. (shrink)

For decades, interdisciplinary research efforts have accumulated insights that diminish the significance of the classic nature versus nurture dichotomy, instead calling for a nuanced, multifactorial approach to ontogeny. Similarly, the role of genes in both phylogeny and ontogeny, once seen as rather deterministic, is now conceptualized as highly dependent on environmental factors, including behavior. Linguistic theories have, in principle, made an effort to incorporate these changing views. However, the central claim of the given paper is that this apparent compliance with (...) biological insights remains superficial. As such, considerable disconnects between linguistic theory and what is known about the biological underpinnings of complex traits persist, negatively impacting pertinent views on language acquisition, language universals and the evolution of language. Given the breadth of these fields of study, the aim of this paper is to tackle the root of the problem: It begins by sketching out linguistic nativism as conceptualized within generativism, pointing to aspects within this position that stand in conflict with the interdisciplinary literature. It will then review select areas of research in a succinct manner in order to substantiate the criticism and characterize the counterposition as found within the biological sciences. The paper will culminate in addressing these disconnects on conceptual grounds, i.e. invoking the term emergence as employed in neuroscience as a possible means to reconcile those biological insights with linguistic nativism. (shrink)

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...) the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by \( \phi \) depends on the logical form of \( \phi \) and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. (shrink)

Are there universal properties grounding our sense of resemblance or qualitative identity among a number of distinct things or events which appear to form a class, a type or a kind of some other sort? Do universals such as humanness, triangularity, or being an Oak exist? Is being a laptop computer a universal, which has only recently come into existence? Do predicate expressions, adjectives or abstract nouns refer to objective properties or cognitive contents called concepts? The problem of (...) class='Hi'>universals has been at the centre of ancient, medieval, Western, and Indian metaphysics. After the logico-linguistic turn in philosophy, this problem re-surfaced in the discourse on the meaning of predicate expressions on the one hand and in the theories of concepts on the other. (shrink)

Inspite of growing interest in research on language universals the concept of language universal itself has not been clarified beyond its status in Greenberg 1966. The present paper is an attempt at further clarification. The concept of language universal presents at least the following basic problems : Which entities are to be called universal? How can universality statements be deductively related to statements on individual languages and to non-linguistic statements, e.g. psychological ones? How are we to conceive the relation (...) between the 'empirical' and the 'non-empirical' in universality research? It is argued that the universal entities should be properties of languages. Three conceptions of universals are characterized: The Naive View , the Semantic View , and the Pragmatic View proposed by the author . It is argued that the Naive View and the Semantic View do not, and that the Pragmatic View may solve the basic problems formulated in Part I. Combining the Pragmatic View with the conception of theories developed in Lieb to appear the author characterizes the ultimate aim of universality research as defining a set of properties that, if taken as universal by any linguist, maximize the fruitfulness of any theory of language. The main task of universality research consists in making universality proposals that are well-founded with respect to that aim. Various principles are suggested by which the well-foundedness of universality proposals can be judged. (shrink)

It has been widely assumed that all languages share some structural features; language universals. Evans and Levinson challenge this assumption and provide a wealth of empirical evidence supporting their claim that linguistic diversity is the most remarkable characteristic of human languages. The response to their paper reveals fundamental disagreements, indicating that different authors rely on substantially different definitions of key terms such as ‘language’ and ‘language universal’. In this paper I will not take sides but discuss the implications of (...) these different definitions on the debate and suggest that conceptual precision is essential for the success of the discipline-crossing collaboration that is needed in language evolution research. Insights gained from other debates in evolutionary theorizing should inform language evolution debates. (shrink)

If language change is constrained by grammatical structure, then synchronic assumptions have diachronic consequences. Theories of grammar can then in principle contribute to explaining properties of change, or conversely be falsified by historical evidence. This has been the main stimulus for incorporating historical linguistics into generative theorizing.

The controversies surrounding Daniel Everett's characterization of the Amazonian language Pirahã and the Evans and Levinson paper about "the myth of language universals" (2009) are just two recent manifestations of a debate about linguistic theory and methodology that is anything but new.

Recently we proposed the linguistic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is called quantum language or measurement theory. This theory is valid for both quantum and classical systems. Thus, we think that quantum language is one of the most powerful scientific theories, like statistics, and thus, it is the scientific completion (i.e., the destination) of dualistic idealism. If so, we can introduce the concept “progress” in the dualistic idealism. For example, we can assert that [Plato → Descartes → Kant → (...) Wittgenstein → quantum language], where [“X” → “Y”] means that “Y” is more like quantum language than “X”. In this paper, we will study the problem of universals from the perspective of quantum language (i.e., from the scientific perspective of ignoring any religious perspective). And we can be confident of the progress of both of the two time series [Plato → Anselmus → Thomas Aquinas → quantum language] and [Descartes → Thomas Aquinas → quantum language] in dualistic idealism. The reader may find it surprising that Scholastic philosophy is more scientific than Cartesian-Kantian philosophy. However, this is because Descartes gave up the pursuit of “universals” and presented dualism as a visible “mind-matter dualism” so that it could be familiar to the general public. This made the Cartesian-Kantian philosophy socially successful, but unscientific. The problem of universals has not always been clear in the long history of philosophy. The reader should be convinced that the reason is that the problem of universals has been discussed in an incomplete non-scientific dualism to this day. (shrink)

This book explores issues at the core of modern linguistics and cognitive science. Why are all languages similar in some ways and in others utterly different? Why do languages change and change variably? How did the human capacity for language evolve, and how far did it do so as an innate ability? Simon Kirby looks at these questions from a broad perspective, arguing that they can be studied together. The author begins by examining how far the universal properties of (...) language may be explained by examining the way it is used, and how far by the way it is structured. He then considers what insights may be gained by combining functional and formal approaches. In doing so he develops a way of treating language as an adaptive system, in which its communicative and formal roles are both crucial and complementary. In order to test the effectiveness of competing theories and explanations, Simon Kirby develops computational models to show what universals emerge given a particular theory of language use or acquisition. He presents here both the methodology and the results. Function, Selection, and Innateness is important for its argument, its methodology, and its conclusions. It is a powerful demonstration of the value of looking at language as an adaptive system and goes to the heart of current debates on the evolution and nature of language. (shrink)

This paper argues for an ontological distinction between two kinds of universals, 'kinds of tropes' such as 'wisdom' and properties such as 'the property of being wise'. It argues that the distinction is parallel to that between two kinds of collections, pluralities such as 'the students' and collective objects such as 'the class'. The paper argues for the priortity of distributive readings with pluralities on the basis of predicates of extent or shape, such 'large' or 'long'.