Linguistic Typology

Language Review/A New Approach to the Systematic Typology of Languages: Introduction and Review of Fundamentals of Linguistic Typology, Rafe’eh Khoshkhoo

What is Phonological Typology?

In this talk I am concerned with the following questions: 1. What is phonological typology? 2. How are phonological typology and phonetic typology the same/different? 3. How are phonological typology and general phonology the same/different? 4. How are phonological typology and general typology the same/different? Despite earlier work by Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet, Greenberg and others, and...

Jae Jung Song, Linguistic typology: morphology and syntax (Longman

The back cover of this book characterizes it as ‘an up-to-date critical introduction to linguistic typology’. The title might suggest that it gives equal coverage to morphology and syntax, but it is mainly about syntax. Chapter 1, ‘Introducing linguistic typology’, is a useful introduction to typology. For someone new to the area, it lays out the object of linguistic typology and discusses some...

Linguistically Naïve != Language Independent: Why NLP Needs Linguistic Typology

In this position paper, I argue that in order to create truly language-independent NLP systems, we need to incorporate linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge in question is not intricate rule systems, but generalizations from linguistic typology about the range of variation in linguistic structures across languages.

Measures of fuzzy disarray in linguistic typology

We extend crisp measures of disarray to the vaguely defined context of natural languages, so as to tackle problems of linguistic typology related to the order of words. We deal both with short abstract structure of the type “subject verb object”, and with texts in the original language and in a translation. Preliminary experimental results are provided.

The Grammaticalization and Disappearance of Adpositions in Nominal Compounds

This article identifies a semantically motivated typology of lexicalization paths to account for the formation of nominal compounds from complex noun phrases. The typology includes coordination, semantic roles and possession, which, systematically, seems to be the origin of various subclasses of appositional, copulative and endocentric compounds, and the typology has serious implications for li...