Funded publications
Now showing items 131-140 of 298
Chapter Dependency-sensitive typological distance
(2013)
In this paper, we will develop two kinds of dependency-sensitive distance metrics. The first captures the idea that if it can be shown that one feature can be (partly) predicted by another, then the predictable feature ...
Chapter Predicting language-learning difficulty
(2013)
The difficulty people have in learning a foreign language strongly depends on how different this language is from their native tongue (Kellerman 1979). Although this statement seems uncontroversial in the general form as ...
Chapter Towards automated language classification
(2013)
In this paper, we discuss advantages of clustering approaches to automated language classification, describe distance measures used for this purpose, and present results of several proof-of-concept experiments. We advocate ...
Chapter Disentangling geography from genealogy
(2013)
In this paper I will not seek to settle this question for individual cases of shared characteristics between two specific languages (e.g. why do French and German have no distance contrast in demonstratives?; see Diessel ...
Chapter Black box approaches to genealogical classification and their shortcomings
(2013)
In the past 20 years, the application of quantitative methods in historical linguistics has received a lot of attention. Traditional historical linguistics relies on the comparative method in order to determine the ...
Chapter Languages of the Middle Andes in areal-typological perspective
(2012)
Among the indigenous languages of the Andean region of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina, Quechuan and Aymaran have traditionally occupied a dominant position. Both Quechuan and Aymaran are ...
Chapter 87 Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon
(2012)
This article develops various arguments for the view that scalar implicatures should be de-rived within grammar and not by a theory of language use (pragmatics). We focus primarily on arguments that scalar implicatures can ...
Chapter Final Phases of Medieval Hebraism
(2010)
"The relationship between Jews and Christians and between Judaism and Christianity during the 13th and 14th century is a matter of concrete and contingent historical circumstances; and its ideological elements ...
Chapter 44 A “Composite Utterances” approach to meaning 45. Towards a grammar of gestures
(2013)
This chapter argues for a composite utterances approach to research on body, language, and communication. It argues that to understand meaning we need to begin with the utterance or speech act as the unit of analysis. From ...
Chapter All typologies leak
(2009)
In his (1921) book, Language, Sapir made the famous observation, “All grammars leak” (38). By this he meant that within the systematic paradigms, rules and routinized patterns of any grammar, we always find a few irregularities ...