Problem of universals ≈ Problem of universals
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Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages Open
Significance We provide the first large-scale, quantitative, cross-linguistic evidence for a universal syntactic property of languages: that dependency lengths are shorter than chance. Our work supports long-standing ideas that speakers pr…
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The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative Concept and Cross-linguistic Generalizations Open
Since the 1970s, serial verb constructions (SVCs) have been discussed widely in African, Oceanic and many other languages throughout the world. This article gives an overview of the most important generalizations about SVCs that have been …
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Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants Open
When do people find it acceptable to sacrifice one life to save many? Cross-cultural studies suggested a complex pattern of universals and variations in the way people approach this question, but data were often based on small samples from…
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Linguistic diversity in first language acquisition research: Moving beyond the challenges Open
The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and …
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SOME SEMANTIC UNIVERSALS OF GERMAN ADJECTIVALS Open
1.1. The structure of natural languages as studied by linguists is connected in several ways with phenomena outside this domain. Problems of this kind are, to mention only three: (a) the acoustical and physiological interpretation of the p…
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Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals Open
Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocaliza…
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Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing Open
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world’s languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that…
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Universals in Learning to Read Across Languages and Writing Systems Open
In this article, we provide a cross-linguistic perspective on the universals and particulars in learning to read across seventeen different orthographies. Starting from the assumption that reading reflects a learned sensitivity to the syst…
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Synchronic Versus Diachronic Explanation and the Nature of the Language Faculty Open
The nineteenth-century conception that linguistic structure was to be explained by recourse to the histories of languages was largely abandoned with the rise of synchronic theories in the twentieth century, but has recently returned to pro…
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Statistical language learning: computational, maturational, and linguistic constraints Open
Our research on statistical language learning shows that infants, young children, and adults can compute, online and with remarkable speed, how consistently sounds co-occur, how frequently words occur in similar contexts, and the like, and…
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Empirical Modelling Of Translation And Interpreting Open
Empirical research is carried out in a cyclic way: approaching a research area bottom-up, data lead to interpretations and ideally to the abstraction of laws, on the basis of which a theory can be derived. Deductive research is based on a …
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CantoCore: A new cross-cultural song classification scheme Open
Classification of organisms and languages has long provided the foundation for studying biological and cultural history, but there is still no accepted scheme for classifying songs cross-culturally. The best candidate, Lomax and Grauer’s “…
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Gender and the Problem of Universals: Catholic Mobilizations and Sexual Democracy in France Open
In the 1980s, John Boswell analyzed the controversy between ‘essentialists’ and ‘constructionists’ in gay and lesbian studies in the light of the medieval ‘problem of universals.’ This paper revives this analogy to understand the controver…
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Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude Open
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on t…
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No universals in the cultural evolution of kinship terminology Open
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Focal colors across languages are representative members of color categories Open
Significance The best examples of color terms across languages are often held to reflect universal focal colors in the opponent pairs red vs. green and yellow vs. blue. An opposing view holds that best examples reflect categories that are …
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Universals, laws, and governance Open
Proponents of the dispositional theory of properties typically claim that their view is not one that offers a realist, governing conception of laws. My first aim is to show that, contrary to this claim, if one commits to dispositionalism t…
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Learnability and semantic universals Open
One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the unive…
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Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages Open
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 productio…
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The Universals of Games and Sports Open
The so-called traditional motor games are group situations that function like small-scale societies, full of emotionally rich vicissitudes and proper objectives, alliances, and antagonisms. Traditional games have certainly been the object …
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Practical judgment as reflective judgment: On moral salience and Kantian particularist universalism Open
Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim for…
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Comparing phoneme frequency, age of acquisition, and loss in aphasia: Implications for phonological universals Open
Phonological complexity may be central to the nature of human language. It may shape the distribution of phonemes and phoneme sequences within languages, but also determine age of acquisition and susceptibility to loss in aphasia. We evalu…
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Psychological security as the foundation of personal psychological wellbeing (analytical review) Open
Background. Security as a socio-cultural phenomenon requires a comprehensive approach and integrates a multitude of aspects of social reality, each of which is important both for an individual and society as a whole. It has been shown that…
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The Making of Vernacular Singapore English: System, Transfer, and Filter Open
Singapore English is a focal point across the many subfields of linguistics, as its semantic, syntactic and phonetic/phonological qualities tell us a great deal about what happens when very different types of language come together. Sociol…
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Exploring diachronic universals of agreement: alignment patterns and zero marking across person categories Open
Exploring diachronic
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Toward a new comparative musicology Open
We propose a return to the forgotten agenda of comparative musicology, one that is updated with the paradigms of modern evolutionary theory and scientific methodology. Ever since the field of comparative musicology became redefined as ethn…
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Taking diachronic evidence seriously: Result-oriented vs. source-oriented explanations of typological universals Open
Classical explanations of typological universals are result-oriented, in that particular grammatical configurations are assumed to arise because of principles of optimization of grammatical structure that favor those configurations as oppo…
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Laughter and culture Open
Like most human non-verbal vocalizations, laughter is produced by speakers of all languages, across all known societies. But despite this obvious fact (or perhaps because of it), there is little comparative research examining the structura…
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Melodic Universals Emerge or Are Sustained Through Cultural Evolution Open
To understand why music is structured the way it is, we need an explanation that accounts for both the universality and variability found in musical traditions. Here we test whether statistical universals that have been identified for melo…
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Post-editese: an Exacerbated Translationese Open
Post-editing (PE) machine translation (MT) is widely used for dissemination because it leads to higher productivity than human translation from scratch (HT). In addition, PE translations are found to be of equal or better quality than HTs.…