Human Universals

What makes us human? What made us become the way we are? One way to answer these questions is to identify the traits that all humans share, traits that are universal features of all human societies. Another way to do so is to ask how humans differ from other species, particularly from our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates. The contributors to this book pursue both approaches, in an effort to understand how evolution has shaped modern human behavior and societies.

This volume explores the universal mathematical properties underlying big language data and possible reasons why such properties exist, revealing how we may be unconsciously mathematical in our language use. These properties are statistical and thus different from linguistic universals that contribute to describing the variation of human languages, and they can only be identified over a large accumulation of usages. The book provides an overview of state-of-the art findings on these statistical universals and reconsiders the nature of language accordingly, with Zipf's law as a well-known example.