Universal Syntactic Structures: Modeling Syntax for Various Natural Languages

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel model for universal syntactic structures, aiming to explain how the human brain encodes language, with analysis across multiple languages and implications for linguistics and cognitive science.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to modeling universal syntax, providing insights into language processing in the human brain and analyzing multiple languages for universality.

Findings

Evidence of universal syntactic structures across languages

Analysis of English and Korean corpora supports universality

Insights into language acquisition and brain encoding mechanisms

Abstract

We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures for all natural languages. As the discovery of DNA's double helix structure shed light on the inner workings of genetics, we wish to introduce a basic understanding of how language might work in the human brain. It could be the brain's way of encoding and decoding knowledge. It also brings some insight into theories in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. After looking into the logic behind universal syntactic structures and the methodology of the modeling technique, we attempt to analyze corpora that showcase universality in the language process of different natural languages such as English and Korean. Lastly, we discuss the critical period hypothesis, universal grammar, and a few other assertions on language for the purpose of advancing our understanding of the human brain.