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This paper investigates universal and areal structures in the lexicon as manifested by colexification patterns in the semantic domains of perception and cognition, based on data from both small and large datasets. Using several methods, including weighted semantic maps, formal concept lattices, correlation analysis, and dimensionality reduction, we identify colexification patterns in the domains in question and evaluate the extent to which these patterns are specific to particular areas. This paper contributes to the methodology of investigating areal patterns in the lexicon, and identifies a number of cross-linguistic regularities and of area-specific properties in the structuring of lexicons.

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.

Introduction. The present paper is a critical study of the classification methodology introduced by S. V. Voronin in 1969. The phonosemantic classification of onomatopoeic (sound imitative) words has been tested on the material of typologically different languages and, in general, has proven itself successful. However, the bulk of empirical evidence calls for minor updates on the classification. The first part of the article contained a detailed description of the classification and a critical analysis of its various aspects. This (the second) part contains suggestions as how to overcome the highlighted difficulties. Methodology and sources. The method applied in the classification is the method of phonosemantic analysis which was introduced by S. V. Voronin. The present article explores the possibilities of its application on data from English and other relevant languages. Results and discussion. The critical analysis of the universal classification of the onomatopoeic words conducted in the first part of the article revealed the presence of several overlapping classes and hyperclasses, as well as other minor inconsistencies. The introduction of additional hyper-classes and re-classification of frequentatives helps to overcome these difficulties. Thus, I move frequentatives-instants and frequentatives-continuants from the class “frequentatives” to form a hyper-class of their own, leaving what were Voronin’s “pure” frequentatives in the former class of frequentatives. I also introduce poly-syllabic onomatopoeic words into the classification. Conclusion. The introduced changes do not not undermine the key principles of the Universal classification formulated by S. V. Voronin but help its practical implementation on the material of typologically different languages.

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

In the abstract the incentive is interpreted both as a psycholinguistic concept and a linguistic universal category; the components of the linguistic model and the functional structure of the incentive act are defined. The bidirection of the act of volition is emphasized. The volition (incentive) is identified as a kind of mental, speech activity, as a set of certain actions conditioned and motivated by the inner state of the speaker. The incentive action is aimed at meeting the communicators’ needs and takes into account their interests. The example of vocative utterances shows how and under what conditions in specific communicative situations they are able to express an incentive modality. Linguistic means of enhancing the emotionally-expressive colouring of vocative utterances of incentive modality determined by the tasks of speech action are considered. It is established that the focus on the positive result of the incentive foresees the obligatory accounting of distinguished or assumed background knowledge, the usage of the single sign system for encoding and decoding information, conventions, communicative situation, etc.

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.

The objective is to substantiate the psycholinguistic parameters of the category of incentive modality that has a direct connection with a number of mental phenomena and the speaker and the addressee, and describe the psycholinguistic model of the act of volition in combination with the study of the mechanisms and processes of perception, interpretation and speech generation governing the functioning of a language unit in a certain psycholingual dimension and its interpretation by the addressee. Materials & Methods. To achieve the stated goal, the descriptive method with its inherent means of external and internal interpretations was used as the main one; the pragmatic method involving the methodology of speech act analysis was also applied to determine the components of the psycholinguistic model of an incentive act and distinguish the types of incentive utterances; classification method – for inventory and systematization of indirectly incentive utterances, contextual-interpretive method – for establishing the transposition of non-incentive utterances into incentive ones in speech activity; intent analysis is involved in the study of indirectly incentive utterances that the addressee interprets as incentive ones in a speech situation. Results. The analysis of the inextricable interconnection of psychological, mental and linguistic processes made it possible to determine the psycholinguistic parameters of the category of incentive modality, in which the content plan (intentional needs of the speaker: orders, wishes, warnings, etc.) and the plan of linguistic representation are clearly explicated. Based on this approach the incentive is interpreted both as a psycholinguistic concept and a linguistic universal category; the components of the linguistic model and the functional structure of the incentive act are defined. The bidirection of the act of volition is emphasized. Conclusions. It is established that the focus on the positive result of the incentive foresees the obligatory accounting of distinguished or assumed background knowledge, the usage of the single sign system for encoding and decoding information, conventions, communicative situations, etc. The incentive explicates the volitional impulse, the indication to the addressee of the incentive action.

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.

There have been few reports clarifying the selection of the language devices and paraverbal means in order to facilitate patients’ complete and unhindered comprehension of the information in informed consent template for dental treatment and to influence them in making right decision. Modality, being one of the main linguistic universals, an anthropocentric category, plays an important role in text generation: derived from the judgment on based on conceiving or imagining a situation, it is then expressed though the language, and reflects intellectual, emotional, and volitional evaluation whether the he premises are justified.

Dr. Bodo Winter’s presentation discussed linguistic iconicity. First, he showed that iconicity can perform different functions in language and that it is present in different linguistic domains among which is the lexicon. As evidence of that, he presents research that shows the occurrence of iconicity in English vocabulary related to size, shape and roughness. At the end of his presentation and in light of the works on which it was based, Dr. Winter defines iconicity as a selective process (since only some aspects of meaning, not its entirety, can be depictively represented), that manifests a sense of resemblance (thus, interpretive), and that depends on the context in which it occurs to be recognized as such. He also claims that iconicity be considered one of the design features of languages ​​and not, like Saussure (1916) and Hockett (1960), arbitrariness, which he considers to be epiphenomenal A apresentação do Prof. Bodo Winter tratou da iconicidade linguística. Primeiramente, ele mostrou que a iconicidade pode desempenhar diferentes funções na língua e que ela está presente em diferentes domínios linguísticos, entre eles o léxico. Como evidência disso, ele apresenta pesquisas que evidenciam a ocorrência de iconicidade no vocabulário relativo a tamanho, à forma e à aspereza do inglês. Ao final de sua apresentação e à luz dos trabalhos que a embasaram, o Prof. Bodo define a iconicidade como um processo seletivo (já que apenas alguns aspectos do significado podem ser representados depictivamente e não sua totalidade), que manifesta uma sensação de semelhança (portanto, interpretativo) e que depende do contexto em que ocorre para ser reconhecida. Ele ainda defende que a iconicidade seja considerada uma das características universais das línguas e não, como Saussure (1916) e Hockett (1960), a arbitrariedade, a qual considera epifenomenal

Natural languages exhibit many semantic universals, that is, properties of meaning shared across all languages. In this paper, we develop an explanation of one very prominent semantic universal, the monotonicity universal. While the existing work has shown that quantifiers satisfying the monotonicity universal are easier to learn, we provide a more complete explanation by considering the emergence of quantifiers from the perspective of cultural evolution. In particular, we show that quantifiers satisfy the monotonicity universal evolve reliably in an iterated learning paradigm with neural networks as agents.

One of the currently biggest challenges in NLP is to develop multilingual language technology. Lack of data in low-resources languages poses great difficulty to NLP researchers and limits NLP technology's availability to a small number of resource-rich languages. It has been shown that linguistic typology and the knowledge of language universals can help NLP in the development of multilingual resources. To contribute to this research area, we present a fuzzy approach to language universals. Our proposal combines a constraint-based formalism with fuzzy logic to define a fuzzy-gradient model to characterize linguistic universals. This model will allow us to evaluate linguistic universals and to define a universal grammar. This universal grammar will be integrated into an automatic technique to infer from linguistic data the particular grammar of any understudied natural language.

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.

The Return of Names in the Context of Language Universals: Ancient and Contemporary Local Names with an International Character The article concerns the history and unique nature of local names derived from exonyms, such as Alexandria, Spain and Lisbon. It describes both past and contemporary onyms, i.e. the names of housing estates, such as Little Tuscany, and apartment buildings, such as Rome, London and Mont Blanc, which are the continuations of the toponymic model launched in the past. The author embeds this model of names in a broader cultural context by referring to language universals. In addition to the rich collection of the oldest biblical names that have been transferred to present names, transfers of old names can be observed among contemporary names. In the past (in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries), these were mainly the names of countries and, less frequently, those of cities, lands and geographic objects. Today, toponyms are usually based on the names of European cities, attractive geographic objects (lakes, rivers, islands, mountains, volcanoes) and, more rarely, states. While the names of biblical lands were fascinating and attractive in the past, they are almost absent in contemporary names, and if they are present, they concern culturally fixed images such as that of Eden. Both formerly and today, the creators of this kind of names show a longing for the creation of a new world which is no longer inhabited by God in a strictly religious dimension, but a secular one where happiness, peace and joy are sought. In both characterised spaces, the names transferred serve commemorative functions and also imitate coveted spaces which cannot be physically inhabited but can at least be imitated by their names. Formerly, they were real imago mundi representing sacred places (e.g. names such as Calvary). Today, they are created as part of the contemporary architectural tendency for coherence in planning space, names and design.

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.