Verbs of letting in Germanic and Romance languages

Lexical and orthographic distances between Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages and their relationship to geographic distance

When reading texts of different but closely related languages, intelligibility is determined among others by the number of words which are cognates of words in the reader’s language, and orthographic differences. Orthographic differences partly reflect pronunciation differences and therefore are partly a linguistic level. Dialectometric studies in particular showed that different linguistic lev...

Prosodic Constraints on the Emergence of Grammatical Morphemes: Crosslinguistic Evidence from Germanic and Romance Languages

Learning Morphology of Romance, Germanic and Slavic Languages with the Tool Linguistica

In this paper we present preliminary work conducted on semi-automatic induction of inflectional paradigms from non annotated corpora using the open-source tool Linguistica (Goldsmith 2001) that can be utilized without any prior knowledge of the language. The aim is to induce morphology information from corpora such as to compare languages and foresee the difficulty to develop morphosyntactic le...

Subjects, Tense and Verb-Movement in Germanic and Romance

This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T's featural requirements can be sati...

Linguistic Adaptation: the Trade-off between Case Marking and Fixed Word Orders in Germanic and Romance Languages

Understanding language evolution in terms of cultural transmission across generations of language users raises the possibility that some of the processes that have shaped language evolution can also be observed in historical language change. In this paper, we explore how constraints on production may affect the cultural evolution of language by analyzing the emergence of the Germanic and Romanc...