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 ...

The new version of the theory, called principles and parameters, replaced a single universal grammar for all the world’s languages with a set of “universal” principles governing the structure of ...

Humans are storytelling beings. As far as we know, no other species has the capacity for language and ability to use it in endlessly creative ways. From our earliest days, we name and describe things.

This paper concerns a particular problem raised by Mandarin Chinese pronouns, viz. they appear to obey a linear precedence constraint unlike English (e.g., Huang (1982)). This calls into question the ...