Linguistic universals

Although several constraints have been proposed in the past to record the grammatical properties of code-switching, the claimed status of their 'universality' has often been questioned. This paper provides a comparative-syntactic account of the properties of code-switching among languages such as Kashmiri-English, Hindi-English, Kashmiri-Hindi, and the much discussed Spanish-English (Poplack, 1980; among others) and Swahili-English (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). Based on this cross-linguistic data, we propose universal constraints on codeswitching which restrict the range of syntactic permutations of code-switches to all and only those that are grammatical. The proposal, couched in Optimality Theory (Prince and , is premised on the assumption that the proposed universal constraints are prioritized: they are defeasible, but only in those contexts in which they conflict with another, presumably higher ranked, constraint. Under this proposal, the observed syntactic differences among languages involved in code-switching turn out to be a result of different (constraint-) ranking configurations opted by individual code-switching grammars. * This paper has benefitted from discussion with several scholars in the field of code-switching, too many to list them here; my thanks to all of them. Many thanks also to the audiences of SALA 94, ESCOL 94, LSA 95, AAAL 95, and the Penn Thursday Linguistics Lecture Series. ' Bentahila and Davies (1995) make a strong argument for the influence of language contact configurations on switching patterns. In this paper I will not address this issue, instead I will restrict the discussion to how the switching patterns observed in different contact configurations in fact obtain. Further, in the absence of phonological and/or morphological evidence of borrowing, I have interpreted single word switches as instances of code-switching. Thus, for example, in a sentence like (3b) 'Every d~&n~ar (storekeeper) was cleaning the front of his walkway', the noun c_lukan&r is not a 'borrowedl item in 037%2166/97/$17.00 0 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII SOO24-3841(97)00007-7

This new book by Daniel Everett stands as a significant contribution to the
discussion of language evolution because it puts forward the strongest claims so
far in what has been an important exchange, probably the most visible in recent
years. While How Language Began (henceforth HLB) is written for a general
readership, the main proposals are presented clearly, drawing the lines of the
debate sharper than in previous turns. Its strong hypotheses now set the stage
for better understanding the points in contention and for drawing us closer to
resolving them.

Certain grammatical patterns are found again and again in the languages of the world. Some of
these patterns recur so frequently that they are given the label “universal”. Explaining the source
of such patterns is clearly an important goal of linguistics, but how to go about doing this is not
obvious. Problems range from the terminological (what sort of patterns should we consider
universal?) to the methodological (what kind of explanation will we accept as sufficient?) to the
theoretical (what role does a universal grammar have in shaping recurrent patterns? what role do
functional considerations play?). How one answers one of these questions will affect how one
answers the others. Can probabilistic generalizations be considered universals? If so, then we
need explanations predicting probabilistic patterns. Are we looking for proximate explanations
(for example, “language A shows pattern X because it inherited it from its parent language”) or
ultimate ones (for example, “language A shows pattern X because only this pattern is permitted
by Universal Grammar”)? Will we assume there is no such thing as Universal Grammar? Then, of
course, we cannot appeal to it for any sort of explanation. Will we assume there is such a thing?
Then, what is its precise structure?

It is a great puzzle that although we all instinctively ‘know’ what human language is, it is surprisingly difficult to nail down concrete, incontrovertible universals. Naively, one might assume that it would be easy to state such apparent truisms as ‘all languages have nouns and verbs’, but even this is more problematic than one might believe (cf. Croft 2003: 13–19, Tomasello 2003: 17–19). Nevertheless, if we hear people chatting in an unfamiliar foreign tongue on a train, although we cannot understand what they are saying, we sense they are using a human language like ours in a way that we do not with the whistles of dolphins, songs of birds or dances of bees. And the fact that, with sufficient exposure, any human child can learn any human language provides ample and repeated proof of the universals that must be present. It is indeed astonishing that human languages can appear outwardly so different in their sounds, grammar and vocabulary, yet any human child can learn any human language without instruction. Even as adults, although learning a new language is often laborious, it is not impossible, given sufficient exposure, practice and motivation.

The existence of the category of proper names is as old as human language, and it can be considered a linguistic and anthropological universal. Names can play several important roles in the life of society, the givers, bearers and users of names. One of these functions is to create and express personal identity. Using names also expresses the naming community's knowledge about the world, familiarity instead of strangeness, the existence of personal connections. Name giving can be an act of humanising, or expressing ownership over the human environment. Names can be given to anybody and anything who/that can be identified and differentiated as an individual, and is considered important in any way for humans. However, there are more and less typical categories of named entities. Namelessness (or anonymity) can primarily (but not exclusively) also be looked at through these considerations. The questions listed here are illustrated in the paper by a wide range of examples for using and giving (or not giving) proper names, in a way that also portrays humans as homo nominans.

This paper introduces a semantically and pragmatically oriented typological generalisation, which is named the orientation principle. It entails that the position of connectives, as defined as a single lexical category including adpositions and conjunctions, provides an explanatory principle for a number of harmonic correlations in crosslinguistic data. A reanalysis of the data guided by this insight is proposed as an alternative to processing approaches.

A number of studies in linguistic typology over the past few years have concentrated on what have come to be called 'euroversals'. In this paper, I shall examine two of them, viz. accusative alignment and the occurrence of a 'have'/'be' alternation in perfective auxiliation. Focusing on Romance dialects, I will show that thorough inspection of dialect variation in (a subset of) the languages of Europe provides crucial insights that have escaped so far the attention of typologists who dealt with these topics. The main results are that, firstly, alternation in perfective auxiliation is not accusatively aligned and, hence, the two euroversals at issue are mutually contradictory; and that, secondly, variation and change in perfective auxiliation across time and space in Romance reflects a shift in the alignment properties of the varieties at issue. More generally, the moral of the present discussion is that serious consideration of dialect variation is a necessary precondition for dispelling the commonplace that represents Europe as a rather dull linguistic landscape with very little structural diversity.

This paper explores the content of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor, the most extensive sleep talker ever recorded, and compares these with dream content from normative male dreams on the Hall and van de Castle Content Scales (1966) and Hobson (et al., 1987) Bizarreness Scales. On the Hall and van de Castle Scales, the somniloquies contained significantly more female characters relative to males than for the norms, more familiar characters and friends, but fewer family members. The dreamer-as-character was much likelier to be either a befriender or an aggressor than in the normative dreams but much less likely to engage in physical aggression specifically.  There was less aggression, friendliness, or sex per character in McGregor’s narratives, as well as less of all three of these types of interaction total than for the norms, but much more self negativity.  There was a lower percentage of negative emotions, good fortune, and success, but the somniloquies were similar to the norms in their levels of misfortune and failure.    On the Hobson Bizarreness Scales, the McGregor somniloquies were not differentiated from dreams on 3 of 6 scales—having similar levels of discontinuity of plot, characters, object, or actions but had slightly fewer incongruities of plot, and many fewer instances of incongruity or  uncertainly of thought. These findings are discussed in terms of presumed brain activation differences—more frontal activation--and also in terms of McGregor’s (1964) personal idiosyncrasies.

The paper presents a search for statistical universals concerning definite articles. The study is based on information on 500 languages taken from the _World Atlas of Language Structures_ and other resources. The chi-squared test of independence is used to identify morphological, syntactic and other features which correlate with the presence of a definite article. Most of these are related to word order or to the syntactic makeup of the language (articles are less common in left-branching and synthetic languages). These correlations are then checked for validity across the six macroareas of WALS. Some parallels are drawn between the discovered associations and known universals.

The focus of this rich volume is total reduplication, that is, reduplicative
constructions where one finds two copies of the same element appearing
adjacent to each other in a way prescribed by the grammar of a language, as
opposed to representing mere repetition.1 To pick one example, in Swahili,
total reduplication of an adjective can be used to code plurality of the noun it
modifies (p. 3) rather than merely emphasizing its semantics. The book’s title
both oversells and undersells its content. On the one hand, its areal focus is
limited to Europe. While examples are drawn from languages beyond the
continent, one will not find a global-scale survey of the sort that has become
familiar since the publication of HASPELMATH ET AL. (2005). On the other
hand, there is much more than areal linguistics here. Extensive attention is
given to methodological issues, the literature review brings interesting older
work to light, and, most importantly, the book convincingly demonstrates that
the understudied phenomenon of total reduplication should be brought solidly
into the fold of linguistic patterns worthy of descriptive and typological
attention as part of grammatical “canon”. This last point is especially
significant given that recent decades have seen much more attention paid to
partial reduplication than total reduplication.

Dunn et al. (2011) employ computational phylogenetic methods to test whether certain pairs of languages features are universally related in that they co-develop over time (Greenbergian implicational universals). They nd little evidence for universal word-order correlations, contrary to both generative and functional accounts of language. Other commentaries in this issue point to potential problems with the approach employed by Dunn and colleagues (e.g. Croft et al, this issue). Some of these are inherent to quantitative typology: in particular, sparsity of available data and uncertainty about language history. There are, however alternative methods for creating new data to test universal biases for certain word orders. Here we discuss two methods that we take to be of particular promise: Articial Language Learning, which has been used to study language acquisition, and Iterative Articial Language Learning, which extends the former method to the study of language change over generations. We discuss recent work within these two paradigms that suggests language learners exhibit universal biases that might cause universals like those discussed by Dunn et al. to emerge over time.

Although several constraints have been proposed in the past to record the grammatical properties of code-switching, the claimed status of their ‘universality’ has often been questioned. This paper provides a comparative-syntactic account of the properties of code-switching among languages such as Kashmiri-English, Hindi-English, Kashmiri-Hindi, and the much discussed Spanish-English (Poplack, 1980; among others) and Swahili-English (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). Based on this cross-linguistic data, we propose universal constraints on codeswitching which restrict the range of syntactic permutations of code-switches to all and only those that are grammatical. The proposal, couched in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), is premised on the assumption that the proposed universal constraints are prioritized: they are defeasible, but only in those contexts in which they conflict with another, presumably higher ranked, constraint. Under this proposal, the observed syntactic differences among languages involved in code-switching turn out to be a result of different (constraint-) ranking configurations opted by individual code-switching grammars.

Le tsafiki, langue barbacoa parlee en Equateur, presente une structure complexe marquee par un mode mediatif et une mirativite. La mirativite encode le statut de la proposition concernant la structure des connaissances generales du locuteur. Ainsi, une situation immediate qui n'est pas facilement assimilee parce qu'elle ne correspond pas aux attentes du locuteur, recoit un marquage special dans la proposition qui encode l'evenement ou l'etat. La mirativite semble universelle meme si elle est marquee grammaticalement par des procedes differents selon les langues. L'A. etudie les similarites de structures entre le tsafiki et le tibetain de Lhasa. Puis il decrit l'interaction entre les marques du miratif avec differentes classes semantiques verbales en tsafiki. Enfin, il discute de l'interaction entre mode mediatif et mirativite

This study present a collection of examples of verbatim language in dreams, with analyses of how this is altered relative to waking language. Grammar is well-preserved in these dreams while meaningfulness is distorted relative to waking criteria. Novel nouns receive special emphasis as do extra-vocal cues such as voice tone. Dreams with verbatim language tend to be unusually long, vivid, and emotionally salient, though this may be a byproduct differential dream recall affecting both.  The present findings will be compared to past research data on language in dreams, and discussed in relation to what's known about brain areas involved in dreaming and areas involved in different linguistic processes.

This article examines crosslinguistic variation in FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES (WH-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology and generative grammar. Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms of processing and complexity. Filler-gap domains are complex in proportion to their size and in proportion to the amount of simultaneous syntactic and semantic processing that is required in addition to gap identification. They are simplified by making the gap easier to identify and process, or by avoiding a gap structure altogether. When grammatical variation is viewed from this perspective many descriptive insights and implicational patterns can be motivated that have either been stipulated or that have gone unnoticed hitherto. This approach provides an alternative to the assumption of innate parameterized subjacency constraints in this area.* INTRODUCTION. This article is concerned with the grammar and processing of FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES, principally WH-questions and relative clauses, across languages. Examples of the relevant structures in English are: (1) a. Who do you think that Mary saw? b. The person who you think that Mary saw is Fred. In many analyses of these structures, a filler is matched with a co-indexed empty position, or gap, as shown in 1'. (1') a. Whoi [do you think that Mary saw Oil

This paper investigates how the neutralization of place contrasts in codas in Azeri. The results show that the data are consistent with the proposed major place of articulation markedness hierarchies by Lombardi (2002) and de Lacy (2005, 2006). The unpermitted coda consonants surface as glottals, which have the least marked place of articulation. However, when the realization of glottals is blocked by a high-ranking faithfulness constraint, coronals surface. Moreover, alveolar affricates surface as post alveolar fricatives, contrary to the claim that [+anterior] is universally less marked than [-anterior]. Based on the evidence from Azeri, Pali, Indonesian, and European Portuguese, we show that there is no universal markedness relationship between [-anterior] and [+anterior].

Le creole palenquero de Colombie presente deux constructions syntaxiques pour exprimer la nature inherente ou contractuelle de la relation entre deux noms. Cette distinction est decrite pour la premiere fois dans cette langue, et sa genese est discutee dans une perspective multicausale : universel linguistique, tendances internes de la langue-cible (l'espagnol), et partiellement, elements d'un substrat kikongo.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a multifactorial analysis of word order in Mbyá Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, based on a corpus of written narratives with multiple layers of annotation. Our goals are to assess the validity of previous claims about Mbyá word order (Martins, 2003; Dooley, 1982; Dooley, 2015), and to explore the effects of different types of factors on the position of core arguments relative to their verb. We show that SV and VO are the most frequently attested orders in matrix clauses and that subordinate clauses favour the OV order. Grammatical function, givenness and clause type (root vs subordinate) are found to be significant predictors of core argument position. We identify differences in object position between Mbyá and Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser and Colijn, 2010), and we argue that these differences support Dietrich (2009)'s proposal that Tupí-Guaraní languages are undergoing a change in word order from OV to VO, induced by contact with Spanish and Portuguese.

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. Additionally, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a multifactorial analysis of word order in Mbyá Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, based on a corpus of written narratives with multiple layers of annotation. Our goals are to assess the validity of previous claims about Mbyá word order (Martins, 2003; Dooley, 1982; Dooley, 2015), and to explore the effects of different types of factors on the position of core arguments relative to their verb. We show that SV and VO are the most frequently attested orders in matrix clauses and that subordinate clauses favour the OV order. Givenness, transitivity and clause type (root vs subordinate) are found to be significant predictors of word order. We identify differences in object position between Mbyá and Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser and Colijn, 2010), and we argue that these differences support Dietrich (2009)'s proposal that Tupí-Guaraní languages are undergoing a change in word order from OV to VO, induced by contact with Spanish and Portuguese.

I discuss the concepts involved in the theory of unmarked word order developed over the last 10 years by G. Cinque. The major necessary addition to the theory as stated by Cinque is the notion of a morphosyntactic class of satellites. The theory is then applied to verb clusters in Germanic. It is shown that clusters consisting of modals, auxiliaries, main verbs, and particles fall nicely under the theory but clusters involving other, more lexical restructuring verbs do not.

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the Aleut chromatic lexicon in order to check whether it follows the existing «universals» claimed by Berlin and Kay few decades ago. As it will be showed, Aleut belongs to those languages that do not follow them. In fact, by means of etymology shall be demonstrated that the formation of such chromatic vocabulary in Aleut is recent and secondary.

A number of studies in linguistic typology over the past few years have concentrated on what have come to be called 'euroversals'. In this paper, I shall examine two of them, viz. accusative alignment and the occurrence of a 'have'/'be' alternation in perfective auxiliation. Focusing on Romance dialects, I will show that thorough inspection of dialect variation in (a subset of) the languages of Europe provides crucial insights that have escaped so far the attention of typologists who dealt with these topics. The main results are that, firstly, alternation in perfective auxiliation is not accusatively aligned and, hence, the two euroversals at issue are mutually contradictory; and that, secondly, variation and change in perfective auxiliation across time and space in Romance reflects a shift in the alignment properties of the varieties at issue. More generally, the moral of the present discussion is that serious consideration of dialect variation is a necessary precondition for dispelling the commonplace that represents Europe as a rather dull linguistic landscape with very little structural diversity.

Intervocalic consonant epenthesis is used as a case study for investigating grammar change. An emergentist framework is adopted, whereby a simple learning mechanism transforms a phonetically-based sound change into a synchronic phonological process. A two-part model of such 'grammaticalizing' change is developed, along with a formal analysis of the necessary model properties. This work demonstrates that perception-based consonant loss could, in principle, lead to synchronic epenthesis. However, the larger number of historic conditions required for its emergence are predicted to make it less likely than other outcomes such as deletion or supple-tion (unpredictable alternation). An important corollary of the latter result is that theoretically dispreferred grammars do not necessarily have to be explicitly marked or removed from the learning space. Input to the hypothetical learner is automatically filtered by asymmetries in the way sound changes occur, the way sounds are organized in words, and the way words are organized in paradigms. The conclusion is that mechanisms other than Universal Grammar are sufficient to produce the observed epenthesis typology without overgenerating. Furthermore, it is argued that the research methodology is a promising one in general for explaining the universal tendencies of human languages.

La theorie de l'adjet developpee par Herslund & Sorensen, dans le cadre de leur theorie de la valence, est une theorie essentiellement localiste, parce que l'adjet est la generalisation d'un argument local. L'A. montre que le point faible de la theorie reside dans l'idee que cette analyse localiste de l'adjet serait universelle. Il presente une approche non localiste de la syntaxe danoise du contenu, en se basant sur le principe que seules les distinctions de contenu qui trouvent une expression dans la langue, peuvent etre fixees. Le danois, caracterise par une frontiere relativement precise entre les relations partie-tout et les lieux, fournit ainsi des preuves typologiques contre cette hypothese d'universalite

A review of two books, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement on 25 May 2018:
- "The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry", by Geoffrey Russom (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- "Signs that Sing: Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse", by Heather Maring (University Press of Florida, 2017)

This paper provides a comprehensive Optimality Theoretic formalization of a Finnish language game. In opposition to earlier rule-based studies, the present analysis motivates the sometimes arbitrary-looking patterns of the game and brings together various phenomena under a unified set of universal constraints. The paper also demonstrates the close relationship between language games and natural languages by showing how the patterns of the game are analysable with the help of constraints of ordinary languages, or constraints that deviate only minimally from the original ones. The analysis of the game offers valuable external evidence for the phonology of Finnish with respect to the internal structure of long segments, vowel harmony, syllable markedness and the integrity of diphthongs.

Greenberg’s famous paper on universals (1963) contains an interesting set of generalizations on features. Universals 30-45 are relevant – in particular to morphosyntactic features. Since then there has been some substantial typological research into features. Equally in formal syntax, features have taken on an ever increasing significance. Indeed, Miller and Sag (1997: 579) call feature structures ‘the fundamental construct used to model linguistic entities’.

It is therefore a good time to review the issues involved. At one extreme they verge on the philosophical, while at the other they concern standardization and even the very practical issue of how we present and gloss examples. As is becoming generally accepted, we shall use the term ‘feature’ for gender, number, and so on, and ‘value’ for feminine, neuter … and singular, dual, plural … (compare Ramat 1998, Corbett 2006b). We shall concentrate on morphosyntactic features, taking the term strictly to imply feature that are relevant to morphology and syntax. We are not here concerned with purely morphological features (for which see Corbett and Baerman 2007). We also distinguish morphosyntactic features from morphosemantic features, which are not relevant to syntax (Stump 2005); an example of a morphosemantic feature would be tense in the numerous languages where tense is morphologically distinguished on the verb but this has no impact on syntax.