Linguistic Diversity as Resource

Linguistic Diversity and Redistribution

This paper investigates the effect of linguistic diversity on redistribution in a broad crosssection of countries. We use the notion of “linguistic distances” and show that the commonly used fractionalization index, which ignores linguistic distances, yields insignificant results. However, once distances between languages are accounted for, linguistic diversity has both a statistically and econ...

Evaluating Unsupervised Dutch Word Embeddings as a Linguistic Resource

Word embeddings have recently seen a strong increase in interest as a result of strong performance gains on a variety of tasks. However, most of this research also underlined the importance of benchmark datasets, and the difficulty of constructing these for a variety of language-specific tasks. Still, many of the datasets used in these tasks could prove to be fruitful linguistic resources, allo...

Africa's Linguistic Diversity

African language classification in the latter half of the 20th century has been dominated by Joseph Greenberg’s work classifying African languages into four linguistic genetic groupings: Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. Current research indicates that there are a minimum of 20 unrelated African language families or isolates. Africa’s linguistic diversity will remain po...

Linguistic diversity and universals

Linguistic Diversity and Theoretical Assumptions

1. Introduction The morphosyntactic diversity of human languages raises problems for many commonly held theoretical assumptions. Syntactic theories typically arise out of the study of a restricted set of issues in a specific group of languages, and then after the fundamental principles of the theory and its analytic constructs have been worked out on the basis of these data, an attempt is usual...