Universals Workshop

Small but Intense Abstract: "Ideation reigns supreme in language, […] volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors." With these words, Edward Sapir (1921:217) claimed that language is primarily a tool for the expression of thought (ideas)...

The linguistic transmission of cognitive practices: reference frames in Mesoamerica Abstract: Ongoing research since the 1970s has shown that speech communities vary in the types of reference frames their members prefer for reference to small-scale space...

Modeling the Acquisition of Phonological Structure Gaja Jarosz, Yale University A rapidly growing research area in phonology investigates the grammatical underpinnings of gradient acceptability and the kinds of computational models that can explain human...

What counts as evidence for universals? Abstract: My talk is about Generative theories of the phonological module (PhM). I will identify some core requirements that such theories impose on evidence for the PhM, then discuss several cases where these...