What if the bridge between our worlds isn’t language at all, but physics? In a recent episode of SETI Live, theoretical physicist Dr. Daniel Whiteson, co-author of Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other ...

A new research project is looking for evidence of “universal grammar” – the notion that humans are hard-wired to understand language from birth. A new research project is looking for evidence of ...

Nearly 7,000 different languages are spoken across the world. But how these languages evolved has long been a source of debate. Now, a group of German researchers has uncovered exactly how language ...

People instinctively organise a new language according to a logical hierarchy, not simply by learning which words go together, as computer translation programs do. The finding may add further support ...

Paul Ibbotson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

In my previous post, The Shape-Shifting Malleability of ‘Universals’ in Universal Grammar, I argued against the thesis that language ‘universals’, such as they are, reside in a biological ...

Reviewed Work: Paths towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard S. Kayne by Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi, Raffaella Zanuttini Journal of Linguistics has as ...

This paper offers a reply to Coopmans' 1984 critique of Hawkins 1979, 1980, 1982. Hawkins had attempted, inter alia, to make typological word order universals relevant to concerns of generative ...

Following the recent British referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), the government has been attempting to figure out what British exit from the EU, or Brexit, actually means.