Typometrics: From Implicational to Quantitative Universals in Word Order Typology

From language-specific constraints to implicational universals

This article seeks to shed more light on the well-studied, yet still challenging, dative alternation. It starts from the cognitive-typological suggestion of Croft (2001, 2003) that language-internal variation is subject to the same constraints as cross-linguistic variation (the semantic map model), and that careful languagespecific research may therefore reveal facts about language in general. ...

Word Order Typology through Multilingual Word Alignment

With massively parallel corpora of hundreds or thousands of translations of the same text, it is possible to automatically perform typological studies of language structure using very large language samples. We investigate the domain of word order using multilingual word alignment and high-precision annotation transfer in a corpus with 1144 translations in 986 languages of the New Testament. Re...

Typology and universals

word order typology of iranian languages

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Word Order Typology in Optimality Theory

1. Introduction. SVO, SOV, VSO and VOS are all well-attested basic word orders in different languages. It is not clear however how to formally motivate why this type of variation at the base exists. In this paper, I intend to look at unmarked word orders in different languages and explain why there is variation at the base. I will propose an analysis within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolens...