The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science.

By Nicholas Evans, Stephen C. Levinson. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2009

1,624 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e086e4e1e4079354adb1f9bd156c4bf36fa23a59

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cultural Studies

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Language and Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Linguistic diversity and language evolution (2016, background): “Looking at only a few languages one might easily get the impression that there are only a few options a grammar might have, but this view breaks down quickly when considering an increasing number of languages (Evans and Levinson 2009).”
The Centrality of Language in Human Cognition (2016, result): “This assumption is at odds with findings of substantial cross-linguistic variability in just about every semantic domain (Evans & Levinson, 2009; Malt & Majid, 2013), which is unexpected and possibly inexplicable if words simply reflect preexisting (universal) categories, creating the distinct…”
Language Proficiency in Native and Nonnative Speakers: An Agenda for Research and Suggestions for Second-Language Assessment (2011, neutral): “There is no need to postulate a language-speciﬁc faculty of mind; language knowledge is acquired with domain-general mechanisms (e.g., Bybee, 2006; Croft, 1995; Evans & Levinson, 2009; MacWhinney, 1999, 2008; Tomasello, 2008).”
Current Emotion Research in the Language Sciences (2012, background): “This brings to the fore linguistic diversity, highlighted in a recent article by Evans and Levinson (2009).”
Pronouns and pointing in sign languages (2013, background): “In a response to Evans and Levinson (2009), we previously noted that very few studies in the sign language literature make such a claim, and that, in fact, most sign linguists assume (and some have explicitly argued) that sign languages do have pronouns (Cormier et al., 2010).1 Arguments for the…”
An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning. (2011, background): “In a recent review article, Evans and Levinson (2009) argued that there are no language universals, and that we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels of structure, across time, and across space.”
WEIRD languages have misled us, too (2010, background): “In the BBS paper “The Myth of Language Universals,” Evans and Levinson (2009) argue that there is little evidence for the view that the variation in language structure is tightly bounded by linguistic universals.”