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Distinction between language and languages is a common structuralist one. Not only can we find it in the hjelmslevian, jakobsonian and benvenistian theories, where it constitutes an axis of elaboration, but what is more inexpected is that it is also present in Martinet’s work, in spite of a sharp criticism of the very notion of language and of the jakobsonian and chomskyan universalist problematics. Saussurean theory shows us that this distinction is inescapable, as soon as language is presupposed instead of being defined. Saussurean definition of language (langue) implies a quite different distinction: between language (langage), the language (langue) and idioms, and this distinction throws a new light on the problematics of general grammar.

This paper highlights the importance of the distinction between general linguistics (the study of Human Language) and particular linguistics (the study of individual languages), which is often neglected. The term “theoretical linguistics” is often used as if it entailed general claims. But I note that (unless one studies non-conventional aspects of language, e.g. reaction times in psycholinguistics) one must study universals if one wants to make general claims. These universals can be of the Greenbergian type, based on grammatical descriptions of the speakers’ social conventions, or they can be based on the natural-kinds programme, where linguists try to describe mental grammars as made up of universal building blocks of an innate grammar blueprint. The natural-kinds programme is incompatible with Chomsky’s claims about Darwin’s Problem, but it is indispensable for a general linguistics in the generative tradition. The Greenbergian programme, by contrast, can make use of framework-free descriptions because its comparisons are based on independently defined universal yardsticks.

This article considers the concept as a linguacultural unit in cognitive linguistics. The research objective was to identify cultural and linguistic universals in the Bashkir language, as well as to reveal its national specificity. The paper gives a review of Russian and Bashkir publications about concepts in the language: definitions, classification, keywords as mental symbols, etc. Bashkir cognitive linguistics studies concepts on the basis of their linguistic and cultural features. The author used the methods of analysis and description in their linguistic and cultural aspects. Studies of the Bashkir national linguistic world view can reveal the national character and ancient linguistic values that are passed from generation to generation. The Bashkir linguistic world view is diverse and rich: the legends, traditions, proverbs, tales, epics, songs, poetry, and fiction reflect the moral, aesthetic, and national features that remain relevant to this day. The research featured the conceptual framework of Ғailә (Family) in works by Mustai Karim. It included such concepts as Әсә (Mother), Inәy (Aunt), Өlәsәy (Grandmother), Atai (Father), Ul (Son), Olatai (Uncle), Aғai (Brother), etc. They reflect such concepts as loyalty, love, mutual respect, mutual understanding and care, kindness, and spiritual kinship, which reveals the versatility and complexity of this content.

Este artigo apresenta uma reflexão sobre os avanços dos estudos em semântica formal de línguas indígenas no Brasil por meio de um compilado das pesquisas realizadas com as línguas karitiana (tupi), wapichana e terena (aruák). O texto subdivide-se em uma primeira parte sobre as contribuições da metodologia empregada pela semântica formal na descrição de línguas sub-representadas, com ilustrações da pesquisa desenvolvida acerca da pluracionalidade em karitiana. Na segunda parte, são apresentadas reflexões acerca das contribuições dos dados de línguas não indo-europeias para a teoria linguística, em especial as abordagens que assumem universais linguísticos. Essa discussão é embasada nas pesquisas sobre a distinção contável-massivo em wapichana e em terena.

This paper aimed at clarifying and further establishing the Cebuano – Bisaya language through a descriptive analysis of the Cebuano-Bisaya utterances of Grade Two pupils from Don Bosco Technology Center during their Mother Tongue class. Moreover, the study determined the Typological Linguistic Universals by Greenberg (1963) applicable to Cebuano, Tanangkingsing’s (2009) Nonverbal clauses, and Pesirla’s (2010) Verb Predicate forms and Content Words existent in the utterances. The study was a descriptive analysis of two regular classroom sessions or two 40-45 minute class between the Mother Tongue teacher and 45 pupils who were all boys. Interesting results were found such as the use of only three kinds of nonverbal clause, the dominance of nouns in their utterances, the existence of all kinds of verb predicates, and the application of 3 out of 6 typological linguistic universals. The results were taken from a teacher – pupils discourse under the supervision of the said academe. Keywords: Cebuano, clauses, linguistic universals, typology, utterances

Argument coding splits such as differential (= split) object marking and split ergative marking have long been known to be universal tendencies, but the generalizations have not been formulated in their full generality before. In particular, ditransitive constructions have rarely been taken into account, and scenario splits have often been treated separately. Here I argue that all these patterns can be understood in terms of the usual association of role rank (highly ranked A and R, low-ranked P and T) and referential prominence (locuphoric person, animacy, definiteness, etc.). At the most general level, the role-reference association universal says that deviations from usual associations of role rank and referential prominence tend to be coded by longer grammatical forms. In other words, A and R tend to be referentially prominent in language use, while P and T are less prominent, and when less usual associations need to be expressed, languages often require special coding by means of additional flags (case-markers and adpositions) or additional verbal voice coding (e.g., inverse or passive markers). I argue that role-reference associations are an instance of the even more general pattern of form-frequency correspondences, and that the resulting coding asymmetries can all be explained by frequency-based predictability and coding efficiency.

Introduction. The universal classification of onomatopoeic words was first introduced in 1969 by Stanislav V. Voronin. In the course of the following fifty years it has been tested on the material of typologically different languages both by the author himself and by other researchers. The aim of this article is to provide a full description of the classification (which has never been published in English before) and to examine its key points critically. The bulk of empirical data collected in the recent years calls for yet another update on the classification. There is a logical contradiction between such classes of onomatopoeic words as frequentatives and frequentatives-(quasi)-instants-continuants. They overlap typologically. This and other minor issues are solved in the present paper.Methodology and sources. The method discussed and applied in the classification is the method of phonosemantic analysis introduced by S. V. Voronin. Empirical data from English and other relevant languages are used for supporting the proposed changes into the classification.Results and discussion. The critical analysis of the Voronin’s universal classification of the onomatopoeic words revealed the presence of overlapping classes and hyperclasses within it, as well as other minor inconsistencies. The empirical typological data allowed to introduce some minor corrections while retaining the main principles of the classification.Conclusion. Introduced half a century ago, Stanislav Voronin’s classification of onomatopoeic words still remains a useful tool of typological research. Critical additions and proposed changes do not lessen its impact on studies in linguistic iconicity. The first part of this paper is devoted to the description of the classification and to the discussion of its advantages and limitations. In the second part of the article some possible solutions to the detected problems are suggested.

In a recent article, Everett (2019) proposed a culture-centered account of the distribution of the observed values for an almost universal grammatical feature, morphological Number (Haspelmath, 201...

This provocative article raises many important issues that need to be addressed and in so doing will advance the fields of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition in several important ways. Fundamental questions concerning multilingual development persist especially with respect to the role of Universal Grammar in this language learning process. This response article has a dual role: It first outlines those areas of agreement with the proposals made in this article and, second, it discusses those areas of the proposed model that need to be confronted in order to have the model evaluated as a fully viable one.

Westergaard’s microcue account raises the question of the exact nature of language transfer in the acquisition of languages as well of how L1/Ln input interacts with the principles of universal grammar (UG) during processing. In order to consider in more detail the actual representation building, processing mechanisms that would be involved, her approach will be spelled out in terms of the Modular Cognition Framework (see Sharwood Smith, 2017; Sharwood Smith and Truscott, 2014; Truscott and Sharwood Smith, 2004, 2019). As well as identifying the way in which microcues would be constructed, this analysis in particular will have the effect of undermining the concept underlying the transfer metaphor as a way of characterizing crosslinguistic influence.

A conferência ministrada pela Prof.ª Dr.ª Diane Lillo-Martin (University of Connecticut) propôs-se à apresentação do panorama de pesquisas sobre aquisição de línguas de sinais (doravante LS), realizadas em cooperação entre pesquisadores norte-americanos e brasileiros. Teve como intuito maior a reflexão de como investigações no domínio da aquisição de LS evidenciam pormenores atrelados a universais linguísticos, de modo a contribuir a hipóteses e teorias já difundidas em estudos anteriores com línguas orais (doravante LO). Em vista disso, abordaram-se tópicos de interesse às áreas de psicolinguística e estudos em aquisição de línguas, tais como questões estruturais das LS, especificamente de American Sign Language (ASL) e Língua Brasileira de Sinais (Libras); efeitos de modalidade visuo-espacial, especificidade do processo de aquisição de linguagem por crianças surdas bilíngues bimodais e implicaturas de privação linguística.

Previous research suggests that toddlers can rely on distributional cues in the input to track adjacent and nonadjacent grammatical dependencies. It remains unclear whether toddlers understand the ...

This study investigates how phonological neighborhood density (PND) affects word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old Russian children in comparison to adults. Previous experiments with English-speaking adults showed that a dense neighborhood facilitated word production but inhibited recognition whereas a sparse neighborhood inhibited production but facilitated recognition. Importantly, these effects are not universal because a reverse PND pattern was found in Spanish-speaking adults. Probably, PND effects depend on the morphological properties of language.This study focuses on PND effects in word production and recognition in terms of facilitation and inhibition in Russian. Our results are consistent with those in Spanish: Russian-speaking adults produced words with dense neighborhoods more slowly and recognized them faster than words with sparse neighborhoods. Russian children showed the same PND effect in recognition and no effect was found in production. The findings support the hypothesis that PND effects in word production and recognition are influenced by the morphological system of language.

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying syntactic structures can give rise to disparities in meaning in particular contexts. In short, analogy falls short of explaining both adult knowledge of language and children’s syntactic development.

Significance Human languages share many grammatical properties. We show that some of these properties can be explained by the need for languages to offer efficient communication between humans given our cognitive constraints. Grammars of languages seem to find a balance between two communicative pressures: to be simple enough to allow the speaker to easily produce sentences, but complex enough to be unambiguous to the hearer, and this balance explains well-known word-order generalizations across our sample of 51 varied languages. Our results offer quantitative and computational evidence that language structure is dynamically shaped by communicative and cognitive pressures., The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties—those related to word order—result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models of complexity and ambiguity and simulate grammars with optimized word-order parameters on large-scale data from 51 languages. Evolution of grammars toward efficiency results in word-order patterns that predict a large subset of the major word-order correlations across languages.

Accepted manuscript. Final version published in Second Language Research, is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658319884116. In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on crosslinguistic influence in L2/Ln acquisition, I first briefly outline the Micro-cue Model of L1 acquisition (Westergaard, 2009a, 2014), arguing that children build their I-language grammars incrementally, paying attention to small distinctions in syntax and information structure from early on. They are also shown to be conservative learners, generally not producing overt elements or performing movement operations unless there is positive evidence for this in the input, thus minimizing the need for unlearning. I then ask the question how this model fares with respect to multilingual situations, more specifically L2 and L3 acquisition. Discussing both theoretical and empirical evidence, I argue that, although L2 and L3 learners are different from L1 children in that they are not always conservative learners, they are also sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, in that transfer/crosslinguistic influence takes place on a property-by-property basis. Full Transfer is traditionally understood as wholesale transfer at the initial state of L2 acquisition. However, I argue that it is impossible to distinguish between wholesale and property-by-property transfer in L2 acquisition on empirical grounds. In L3 acquisition, on the other hand, crosslinguistic influence from both previously acquired languages would provide support for property-by-property transfer. I discuss a few such cases and argue for what I call Full Transfer Potential (FTP), rather than Full (wholesale) Transfer, within the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) of L3 acquisition. Thus, rather than assuming that ‘everything does transfer’, I argue that ‘anything may transfer’.

This article describes a study of legal texts (in English, French, and Russian) to confirm J. Greenberg’s linguistic universals № 11 and 14. The linguistic universal № 14 refers to the ordering of subject, object, and verb in a conditional clause. Anna Wierzbicka refers the predicate “if” (which forms the conditional) to the number of semantic primitives. The linguistic universal № 11 asserts in declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the predominant dominant order has the subject followed by the object. This study revises some of the most important provisions set forth by J. Greenberg for the languages with SVO word order. Some languages use relatively restrictive word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey important grammatical information. Others — often those that convey grammatical information through inflection — allow more flexibility, which can be used to encode pragmatic information such as topicalisation or focus. It is hypothesized that, due to genre-stylistic and historical-cultural specificity, the texts of laws in French and English do not have a dominant word order. Texts of laws in Russian for the same reasons also do not have a dominant SVO word order.

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system—epistemicity and veridicality. An e...

This article suggests a new approach to the negation study in English and Ukrainian official and business communication as cognitive and discursive formation. Thus, the means of expressing objections in the official-business discourse in the English and Ukrainian languages and the relation of the category of objection to linguistic universals. With the help of a historical comparative research method, general cultural trends in the field of official and business communication between English and Ukrainian speakers were identified.General cultural tendencies in the sphere of English and Ukrainian speakers’ official and business communication were determined. The methods of linguistic and speech means of negation comparison in English and Ukrainian official and business discourse were devised. Conclusions: the list of linguistic means on English and Ukrainian different system levels concerning to the possibility of the negative meaning realization in business discourse were determined.

Negation is a linguistic universal that poses difficulties for cognitive and computational processing. Despite many advances in text analytics, negation resolution remains an acute and continuously researched question in Natural Language Processing. Reliable negation parsing affects results in biomedical text mining, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and many other fields. The availability of multilingual pre-trained general representation models makes it possible to experiment with negation detection in languages that lack annotated data. In this work we test the performance of two state-of-the-art contextual representation models, Multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa. We resolve negation scope by conducting zero-shot transfer between English, Spanish, French, and Russian. Our best result amounts to a token-level F1-score of 86.86% between Spanish and Russian. We correlate these results with a linguistic negation typology and lexical capacity of the models.

Language research has come to rely heavily on large-scale, web-based datasets. These datasets can present significant methodological challenges, requiring researchers to make a number of decisions about how they are collected, represented, and analyzed. These decisions often concern long-standing challenges in corpus-based language research, including determining what counts as a word, deciding which words should be analyzed, and matching sets of words across languages. We illustrate these challenges by revisiting "Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication" (Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011), which found that word lengths in 11 languages are more strongly correlated with their average predictability (or average information content) than their frequency. Using what we argue to be best practices for large-scale corpus analyses, we find significantly attenuated support for this result and demonstrate that a stronger relationship obtains between word frequency and length for a majority of the languages in the sample. We consider the implications of the results for language research more broadly and provide several recommendations to researchers regarding best practices.

A foundational goal of linguistics is to investigate whether shared features of the human cognitive system can explain how linguistic patterns are distributed across languages. In this paper we report a series of artificial language learning experiments which aim to test a hypothesised link between cognition and a persistent regularity of morpheme order: number morphemes (e.g., plural markers) tend to be ordered closer to noun stems than case morphemes (e.g., accusative markers) (Universal 39; Greenberg, 1963). We argue that this typological tendency may be driven by learners’ bias towards orders that reflect scopal relationships in morphosyntactic and semantic composition (Bybee, 1985; Rice, 2000; Culbertson & Adger, 2014). This bias is borne out by our experimental results: learners—in the absence of any evidence on how to order number and case morphology—consistently produce number closer to the noun stem. We replicate this effect across two populations (English and Japanese speakers). We also find that it holds independent of morpheme position (prefixal or suffixal), degree of boundedness (free or bound morphology), frequency, and which particular case/number feature values are instantiated in the overt markers (accusative or nominative, plural or singulative). However, we show that this tendency can be reversed when the form of the case marker is made highly dependent on the noun stem, suggesting an influence of an additional bias for local dependencies. Our results provide evidence that universal features of cognition may play a causal role in shaping the relative order of morphemes.

Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in communicative efficiency. It has been argued that language users act efficiently, saving effort for processing and articulation, and that language structure and use reflect this tendency. The emergence of new corpus data has brought to life numerous studies on efficient language use in the lexicon, in morphosyntax, and in discourse and phonology in different languages. In this introductory paper, we discuss communicative efficiency in human languages, focusing on evidence of efficient language use found in multilingual corpora. The evidence suggests that efficiency is a universal feature of human language. We provide an overview of different manifestations of efficiency on different levels of language structure, and we discuss the major questions and findings so far, some of which are addressed for the first time in the contributions in this special collection.

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and Menzerath’s Law both make predictions about the length of linguistic units, based on corpus frequency and the length of the carrier unit. Each contributes to the efficiency of languages: for Zipf, units are more likely to be reduced when they are highly predictable, due to their frequency; for Menzerath, units are more likely to be reduced when there are more sub-units to contribute to the structural information of the carrier unit. However, it remains unclear how the two laws work together in determining unit length at a given level of linguistic structure. We examine this question regarding the length of morphemes in spoken corpora of nine typologically diverse languages drawn from the DoReCo corpus, showing that Zipf’s Law is a stronger predictor, but that the two laws interact with one another. We also explore how this is affected by specific typological characteristics, such as morphological complexity.

The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more‐ versus less‐direct causation, preferring to mark them with less‐ and more‐ overt marking, respectively (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE the boy cry). To this end, we investigated whether a recent computational model which learns to predict speakers’ by‐verb relative preference for the two causatives in English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, and K'iche’ Mayan is able to generalize to a sixth language on which it has never been trained: Balinese. Judgments of the relative acceptability of the less‐ and more‐transparent causative forms of 60 verbs were collected from 48 native‐speaking Balinese adults. The composite crosslinguistic computational model was able to predict these judgments, not only for verbs that it had seen, but also––in a split‐half validation test––to verbs that it had never seen in any language. A “random‐semantics” model showed only a relatively small decrement in performance with seen verbs, whose behavior can be learned on a verb‐by‐verb basis, but achieved zero correlation with human judgments when generalizing to unseen verbs. Together, these findings suggest that Balinese conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to these unrelated languages, and therefore constitute support for the view that the distinction between more‐ versus less‐distinct causation constitutes a morphosyntactic universal.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters to the patterns and limits of variation manifested by various analoguos structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (for example, word order, tense and aspect, inflection, colour terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The majority of the the articles are written in English, some in French or German.

In recent decades, with the advent of corpus-based translation studies, increasing attention has been paid to the concepts of “translationese” and “translation universals”, whose definitions often overlap and cause controversy among translation scholars in China. After a review of the development and the shift of the research paradigms of these two concepts and their definitions, as well as outlining the possible corpus-based approaches to study them, the corpus data suggests that the term “translationese” could potentially be translated as tezheng yiyu (translation-specific language) rather than fanyiqiang to create a more descriptive and neutral nature. The chapter discusses the continuum features of translationese and their relationship with translation universals to further illustrate their significance in the theory and practice of translation studies. Translationese, according to our corpus data, concerns a much wider range than translation universals. It includes both characteristics and universals presented in translation languages, and therefore it is the starting point and necessary condition for translation universals studies. In addition, the pursuit of translation universals is different from that of language universals, though they both deal with languages. The former focuses on the “abnormal” part of the original language, aiming at identifying rules from differences. Consequently, the “third code” is actually a result presented by cognition and a tendency of common thinking in the process of language conversion.

In this chapter we introduce the first-order languages. They obey simple, clear formation rules. In later chapters we shall discuss whether, and to what extent, all mathematical propositions can be formalized in such languages.

The previous chapter was dedicated to considering the background of this book from the viewpoint of universals. It involved notions originating in the humanities, especially linguistics and philosophy. Because language is a system to represent meaning, the analysis to acquire those linguistic universals involved meaning. In contrast, statistical universals, as briefly introduced before, derive from statistical analysis methods. The means—statistics—of this book goes beyond counting and involves statistical mechanics. Hence, this chapter sets out the basis for applying such methods to language.

Syntagmatic redundancy involves the multiple expressions of a single meaning within a phrase or clause. It is often claimed to be a linguistic universal that serves to facilitate expressivity, processing, and learnability. However, there is little empirical evidence supporting this theory. This paper combines a typological study of concord, a form of syntagmatic redundancy in which a lexical and a grammatical item with overlapping meanings are expressed in the same phrase or clause, with a functional analysis of concord. The purpose of the study was to find out if redundancy is indeed universal or whether there are cross-linguistic restrictions. The goal of the functional analysis was to provide better understanding of what motivates different forms of redundancy. Reference grammars of a 50-language variety sample were analyzed for the existence and communicative functions of four types of concord. The results show that argument concord and temporal concord are nearly universal, whereas only a subset of languages allow for negative concord and plural concord. Two functional principles are shown to motivate concord: the need to be precise, and the need to emphasize crucial information. These principles lead to distinct types of redundancy: The need to be precise results in accidental redundancy in the case of an obligatory grammatical marker, whereas the need to emphasize information invokes purposeful redundancy. The two types of redundancy are shown to be fundamentally distinct in their communicative nature as well as their characteristic diachronic development. Syntagmatic redundancy involves the multiple expressions of a single meaning within a phrase or clause. It is often claimed to be a linguistic universal that serves to facilitate expressivity, processing, and learnability. However, there is little empirical evidence supporting this theory. This paper combines a typological study of concord, a form of syntagmatic redundancy in which a lexical and a grammatical item with overlapping meanings are expressed in the same phrase or clause, with a functional analysis of concord. The purpose of the study was to find out if redundancy is indeed universal or whether there are cross-linguistic restrictions. The goal of the functional analysis was to provide better understanding of what motivates different forms of redundancy. Reference grammars of a 50-language variety sample were analyzed for the existence and communicative functions of four types of concord. The results show that argument concord and temporal concord are nearly universal, whereas only a subset of languages allow for negative concord and plural concord. Two functional principles are shown to motivate concord: the need to be precise, and the need to emphasize crucial information. These principles lead to distinct types of redundancy: The need to be precise results in accidental redundancy in the case of an obligatory grammatical marker, whereas the need to emphasize information invokes purposeful redundancy. The two types of redundancy are shown to be fundamentally distinct in their communicative nature as well as their characteristic diachronic development.

Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (e.g., speaker, addressee). As with other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely crosslinguistically. Different theories have been proposed to constrain the set of possible person partitions that humans can represent, explaining their typological distribution. This article introduces an artificial language learning methodology to investigate the existence of universal constraints on person systems. We report the results of three experiments that inform these theoretical approaches by generating behavioral evidence for the impact of constraints on the learnability of different person partitions. Our findings constitute the first experimental evidence for learnability differences in this domain.

The article is concerned with educating the concepts “proper name * toponym + anthroponym” linguocultural category and summarizing the analysis with regard to cognitive perception of Nakh-Dagestanian languages. If we consider the interpretation of the terms “proper name * toponym + anthroponym” from viewpoint of cognitive perception, then the world picture as a linguocultural category actualizes the concept “nature ↔ toponym + color ↔ anthroponym + color”. This procedure for analyzing the terms in the conceptualization of the Nakh-Dagestanian languages makes it possible to adjust the interpretation of the Russian language “Concept “nature” ↔ color + toponym ↕ color + anthroponym”. An analysis of the material shows that the interpretation of the terms with the designation of the concept “nature” differs in hierarchical types of asymmetry of the Nakh-Dagestanian languages of ordered types “class ↔ class member”, and the degree of influence of the scientific world picture on the meaning of the everyday picture of the region is usually structured by the analysis of translation into the Russian language.

This chapter discusses non-standard grammatical features of regional varieties of English in relation to their Standard English functional equivalents. It pursues a cross-linguistic typological approach in the classification and interpretation of these features. This approach helps to reveal the often highly systematic relationship between standard and non-standard variants as well as the universal basis of the underlying cognitive principles. Illustration is drawn from reflexive marking, pronominal gender and case, tense and aspect, negation and negative concord, subject–verb agreement, and clause structure, which here includes ditransitive constructions, embedded inversion, and the formation of relative clauses.

Functionalism views language in terms of form-to-function and function-to-form mappings. Functional approaches to second language acquisition investigate such mappings in interlanguage and are especially interested in how these change over time in the developing interlanguage system. Studies in the concept-oriented framework typically take as evidence language used communicatively, a subset of what is generally called production data. Looking at language production over time shows that the learners exhibited variable rates of emergence for reverse-order reports. The study of interlanguage development from a concept-oriented approach highlights the relationship of the various linguistic devices that learners may employ to express a given concept. The basic claim of functional approaches is the centrality of meaning and function in influencing language structure and language acquisition. The concept-oriented approach is particularly compatible with other meaning-oriented or function-oriented approaches to language and linguistic universals, such as semantic or notional typology, which investigates the expression of semantic concepts across the world’s languages.

The article analyzes the features of the functioning of proper names in the news socio-political discourse in different countries and regions (Russia, Tatarstan, Vietnam, Albania). The authors consider the psycholinguistic aspects of the use of PN’s in texts about coronavirus, identify the features of the impact of such texts on the reader, and identify the target orientation of such texts. Hypothesis: PN in news reports about coronavirus in modern socio-political discourse in conditions of quarantine and self-isolation serve as a bond that unites different layers of society, creating a hologram of a single mental space. The very problem of coronavirus is potentially dangerous for society due to the increased attention of all representatives of society to the problem of health. The relevance is due to the increasing influence of AI on personality identification and the problems of attribution of texts in the news sociopolitical discourse since it has a priority influence on the transformation of public consciousness. The authors consider the traditional role of PN’s in the news text, with an emphasis on performing the tasks of a certain ethnolinguistic and cultural marker. The study helps to understand language universals in the transmission of psychoemotional moods in a situation of stress in a pandemic situation.

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 stand untenable and are largely abandoned. The proposal tackles the hypothetical contents of UG using dependent and polymorphic type theory in a framework very different from the Chomskyan one(s). Linguistic-typologically, the key novelty is introducing universal supercategories (categories of categories) for natural language modeling. Type-theoretically, we introduce a typed logic for a precise, universal and parsimonious representation of natural language morphosyntax and compositional semantics. The implementation of the logic in the Coq proof assistant handles grammatical ambiguity (with polymorphic types), selectional restrictions, quantifiers, adjectives and many other categories with a partly universal set of types.

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb object) languages. It is possible then that the mind is more likely to expect case marking when confronted with a language with SOV word order but not necessarily so if the language has SVO word order. We tested this hypothesis with 54 naive learners of Latin with English as a first language (L1). The participants were divided into two groups. One received a 100-word input treatment in Latin that contained only simple SOV sentences, and the other received the same input treatment except that the word order of the treatment sentences was SVO. After the treatment, a surprise self-paced reading test that contained grammatical and ungrammatical case-marked sentences was administered. Participants read test items that matched the word order of the treatment they received (i.e. SOV learners read SOV sentences, and SVO learners read SOV sentences). Results showed a significant slowing down on ungrammatical sentences for the SOV group but not for the SVO group. However, on a test of basic sentence comprehension in which case marking was the cue to determine who did what to whom, we found no distinction between the groups. We discuss these findings in light of how typological universals work in languages and what they could mean for language acquisition.

The wanna facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: Wanna is grammatical in certain contexts (Who do you want PRO to play with?) but not others (Who do you want who to play with you?)....

Significance When we speak, we unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others and sometimes pause. Such slowdown effects provide key evidence for human cognitive processes, reflecting increased planning load in speech production. Here, we study naturalistic speech from linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world. We show a robust tendency for slower speech before nouns as compared with verbs. Even though verbs may be more complex than nouns, nouns thus appear to require more planning, probably due to the new information they usually represent. This finding points to strong universals in how humans process language and manage referential information when communicating linguistically., By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However, this speed is not constant—speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. We attribute this slowdown effect to the increased amount of planning that nouns require compared with verbs. Unlike verbs, nouns can typically only be used when they represent new or unexpected information; otherwise, they have to be replaced by pronouns or be omitted. These conditions on noun use appear to outweigh potential advantages stemming from differences in internal complexity between nouns and verbs. Our findings suggest that, beneath the staggering diversity of grammatical structures and cultural settings, there are robust universals of language processing that are intimately tied to how speakers manage referential information when they communicate with one another.

Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages.

The authors focus on idioms as means of categorization of the world and means of keeping temporal and spatial cultural-historical data transmission. Special attention is given to the symbolic meaning of idiom components. Aspects of English phraseology are analyzed by emphasizing phraseological antonymy as an important linguistic universal that is pointed out as binary structures playing an important role in cognition by participating in cognitive and structural processes. The analysis considers explicit and implicit representation of the concept of ‘white,’ its semiotic and symbolic meanings and its psychical effect on a human being. The article focuses on the process of phrase-forming as a language phenomenon and an efficient means of term-formation in the English language. The authors discusses possibility of using and reproducing idioms with the phraseological model adjective noun and forecasts further term-formation according to the phraseological model. The article is aimed at showing interaction of linguistic and extra linguistic aspects within an idiom, as a linguistic unit, and the way the linguistic aspects transform into extra linguistic ones and vice versa.

I will first describe (1) the linguistic situation in modern-day Assam (Northeast India) and the historical hypotheses that might explain it. These hypotheses are subjected to criticism. Next, I will analyse (2) in detail, the phonological concordances in the Tibeto-Burman languages and dialects of Central Assam that form the Boro-Garo group. I will present detailed criteria – the most detailed of all will concern the diphthongs – with examples, which will enable us to classify the languages. Using these criteria will also allow us to take advantage of certain ancient sources of information on dialects which are, in some cases, extinct. The study (3) of other Tibeto-Burman languages will consolidate our criteria and specify their historical development. Finally (4), I will propose a historical reconstruction of linguistic layers, after which (5) I will emphasise the importance of the distinction, central to our discussion, between language change and ethnic change (where cultural and physical anthropology follow distinct paths) before proposing a basis for a more general investigation of the Boro-Garo languages. Northeastern India is home to a great number of languages, mainly from the Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer, Tai and Indo-Aryan groups. This paper first summarises the current historical interpretations of this plethora, and concentrates on the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the lowlands, sc. the Boro-Garo subgroup. A phonological comparative assessment of the data provides a classification with definite criteria, and suggests historical interpretation. Central to this comparative study are the vowel systems, the analysis of which allows us to understand far better (and to use more appropriately) the older lexical lists from 1805. The result of this assessment is a new direction of research, when it appears that the Zeliangrong languages (traditionally taken as Southern Naga) offer a remarkable and certainly unexpected linguistic link between the Boro-Garo and the Kuki Chin (and Naga) languages. The paper exemplifies how language histories remain distinct from ethnic and political developments, and makes a useful contribution to a finer historical understanding of complex human situations.

Anaphoric expressions such as repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns serve a major role in the creation and maintenance of discourse coherence. The felicitous use of an anaphoric expression is highly dependent on the discourse salience of the entity introduced by the antecedent. Gordon et al. (Cogn Sci 17:311-347, 1993) showed that, in English, sentences containing repeated names were read more slowly than corresponding sentences containing pronouns when the antecedent of the anaphoric expression was the subject of the previous sentence. This effect was dubbed the Repeated Name Penalty (RNP), and it was further found that this processing delay is eliminated if the antecedent of the anaphoric expression is the object of the previous sentence. The RNP was later extended to Mandarin Chinese (Yang et al. in Lang Cogn Process 14:715-743, 1999) and to Spanish (Gelormini-Lezama and Almor in Lang Cogn Process 26(3):437-454, 2011), which suggests that this might be a universal phenomenon. Moreover, the Spanish results showed an additional effect: sentences containing overt pronouns were read more slowly than corresponding sentences containing null pronouns when the antecedent of the anaphoric expression was the subject of the previous sentence. This effect was dubbed the Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP) and, like the original RNP, the effect is also eliminated if the antecedent is in object position (Gelormini-Lezama and Almor 2011; Gordon et al. 1993). The similarity of the RNP and the OPP in Spanish suggests that these two processing phenomena might be caused by the same underlying principles. This paper is a critical review of the literature on these processing delays in Spanish and an attempt to integrate the data in a unified framework. Specifically, and following pragmatic explanations like the Informational Load Hypothesis (Almor in Psychol Rev 106:748-765, 1999), the RNP and OPP in Spanish can be understood as superficial manifestations of an imbalance between processing cost and discourse function.

The subject of this paper was inspired by my collaboration on a project involving the long-term histories of grammatical traditions led by Dr. Philomen Probert at the University of Oxford. Owing to my interest in linguistic typology and the study of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface in a number of languages, – especially Native American languages, which differ in many respects from Indo-European languages, –, I have observed that some languages cannot be accurately described if we use the grammatical terms and concepts commonly applied to the analysis of extensively studied languages such as English, Spanish or French, as certain grammatical properties of one language may not be equivalent to those of another and, consequently, require a different treatment. Thus, firstly, by adopting a holistic comparative perspective deriving from all areas of grammar, I aim to reveal the distinctive features that Plains Algonquian languages such as Cheyenne / Tsėhesenėstsestȯtse (Montana and Oklahoma, USA), Blackfoot / Siksika, Kainai, and Pikani, (Montana, USA; Alberta, Canada), Arapaho / Hinono´eitiit (Wyoming and Oklahoma, USA), and Gros Ventre / White Clay or Atsina / Aaniiih (Montana, USA) display when compared with Indo-European languages such as English, Spanish, French or German. The subsequent examination of these data will provide examples of terms and concepts that are typically used in traditional grammatical descriptions, but that do not serve to characterize the grammar of these Native American languages accurately. Finally, I will attempt to propose alternative terms and concepts that might describe the distinctive grammatical properties exhibited by these languages more adequately. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy driven pattern associations. Experiment 2 explored the psycholinguistic reality of the so-called apophonic path by prompting two inflections for one given nonce-word. Data were analyzed using generalized mixed effects models accounting for within-subject as well as within-item variance. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 support the notion of a pattern associator and yield only scarce evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of a universal apophonic path. Therefore, the organization of irregular verb morphology in the mental lexicon of intermediate GFL learners might best be captured by the linguistic notion of structured lexical entries as well as the psycholinguistic mechanism of an analogy-based pattern associator.