Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Toward a Computational Dialectology

Computational dialectology in Irish Gaelic

Dialect groupings can be discovered objectively and automatically by cluster analysis of phonetic transcriptions such as those found in a linguistic atlas. The first step in the analysis, the computation of linguistic distance.between each pair of sites, can be computed as Levenshtein distance between phonetic strings. This correlates closely with the much more laborious technique of determinin...

Is a syntactic dialectology possible ? Contributions from Swiss German

Quantitative Social Dialectology: Explaining Linguistic Variation Geographically and Socially

In this study we examine linguistic variation and its dependence on both social and geographic factors. We follow dialectometry in applying a quantitative methodology and focusing on dialect distances, and social dialectology in the choice of factors we examine in building a model to predict word pronunciation distances from the standard Dutch language to 424 Dutch dialects. We combine linear m...

Computational Dialectology Using Glaps - Automated Processing Of Field Survey Data

Linguistic geography and sociolinguistics have been widely employed among dialectologists in postwar Japan. Over the last ten years, computer-processing of field survey data has become more and more common. The author originally developed the GLAPS processor to produce linguistic atlases by computer. GLAPS has since been modified to ,produce glottograms and crosstables and to handle sociolingui...

Syntactic comprehension in agrammatism: A computational model

In this paper we present a detailed computational model of agrammatic aphasia that is consistent with the Slow Syntax Hypothesis. In particular, our model postulates that the cause of the slowing of syntax processing is a deficit in overcoming irrelevant active lexical cues. This causes interference in retrieval of lexical and semantic information, which in turn causes a misrepresentation of se...