Human languages are universally structured as trees
the verdict
CONTESTED PARTIAL
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
1 source for · 1 against
AS REPORTEDno primary record reached; this is what the reporting says
The claim that human languages are universally structured as trees is contested; some linguistic theories propose universal tree structures, whereas critics point to counterexamples of languages with non-tree grammars.
... tree structures are self - similar . In this chapter , we first explain certain universal properties of human language discovered in modern linguistics , and we present hypotheses regarding how sentence structures are processed in the ...
This collection of nine papers brings together Naoki Fukui’s pioneering body of work on Merge, the basic operation of human language syntax, from the two distinct but related perspectives of theoretical syntax and neurosciences. Part I presents an overview of the development of the theory of Merge and its current formulations in linguistic theory, highlighting the author’s previously published papers in theoretical syntax, while Part II focuses on experimental research on Merge in the brain science of language, demonstrating how new techniques and the results they produce can inform the study of syntactic structures in the brain in the future. By combining insights from theoretical linguistics and neurosciences, this book presents an innovative unified account of the study of Merge and pav
Geoffrey Sampson. languages with grammars that have nothing to do with tree structure . That is to say , in such a ... human languages all have what are technically called indexed grammars , which impose tree structures on their ...
When it was first published in 1997, Geoffrey Sampson's Educating Eve was described as the definitive response to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and Noam Chomsky's nativism. In this revised and expanded new edition, Sampson revisits his original arguments in the light of fresh evidence that has emerged since the original publication. Since Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in the 1960s, it has increasingly come to be accepted that language and other knowledge structures are hard-wired in our genes. According to this view, human beings are born with a rich structure of cognition already in place. But people do not realize how thin the evidence for that idea is. The 'Language Instinct' Debate examines the various arguments for instinctive knowledge, and finds that each one