Mora Maldonado, Alexander Martin and Jennifer Culbertson
Week 1, August 3-7, 2020
Abstract:
What is the range of variation in human languages? Despite their apparent differences, natural languages seem to exhibit many profound similarities between them. These similarities, often referred to as _linguistic universals_ (though they are often strong statistical tendencies rather than totally universal) occur at all levels of linguistic analysis, ranging from phonology to semantics. In order to identify which properties are constant across languages and which ones are not, researchers have traditionally relied mainly on data from acquisition or typology.