Questions tagged [universal-grammar]

a theory usually associated with Noam Chomsky which claims the existence of a human-innate universal grammar consisting of features that all natural human languages share, enabling children to acquire a language without being taught explicitly, but only having to set language-specific parameters during exposure to language input

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How did Chinese recursion evolve?

The modern Chinese linguistic recursion system is essentially the same as English. If you have a highly embedded sentence, you can translate it word for word, the embedding is very much the same. In ...
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What is the difference between AUG and CCG?

What is the difference between Applicative Universal Grammar and Combinatory Categorial Grammar? They both use type inference rules to define their grammars. Is it simply that CCG uses combinatory ...
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Is there any evidence pro/contra Du Bois' Preferred Argument Structure (ergative patterning in discourse)?

In The Discourse Basis of Ergativity published in Language in 1987, John W. Du Bois proposed a theory which stated that (p. 850) [universally] the distribution of new information vs. old ...
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How did Sanskrit embedding evolve?

This question is an extension of this one: How did Chinese recursion evolve? . In the comments, Mark Beadles helpfully pointed out that center-embedding is absent from Sanskrit in the early Vedic ...
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Is the sequence of time adverbials, place adverbials and manner adverbials appearing in the same sentence universal or typologically determined?

For example, in English there is "I bought a dress with my friend at the mall yesterday" where the sequence is manner-place-time, while in Russian it is time-place-manner, in Mandarin it is ...
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Abandoning (conventional) lexical class

I am curious to know more about approaches to linguistics that aren’t centrally based on central word classes like nouns, verbs, etc. Instead of taking them as important categories, there could ...
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Induction of semantics for grammars of natural languages (as opposed to syntax)

I am learning about combinatory categorial grammars and the formal semantics of natural language, course by Partee http://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2005/MGU05_formal_semantics.htm (especially ...
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“Such” as a pronoun and “Reduction Transformations”

I just ran into this in the novel "Pride and Prejudice" -"Ah! you do not know what I suffer." -"But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into ...
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