Current work on universal dependency schemes in NLP does not make reference to the extensive typological research on language universals, but could benefit since many principles are shared between the two enterprises. We propose a revision of the syntactic dependencies in the Universal Dependencies scheme (Nivre et al. [16, 17]) based on four principles derived from contemporary typological the...

What are the origins of elite splits? Why do regional elites break away from central and develop parties? This paper contends that intra-elite differences more likely to be politicized when an economic shock exacerbates pre-existing asymmetric preferences disadvantaged can mobilize electorate on basis identity. I employ constituency-level data Catalonia spanning late 19th early 20th century tes...

This paper describes the Pavia Typological Database (PTD), a follow-up to the MED-TYP database (Sansò 2004). The PTD is an evergrowing repository of primary linguistic data (words, clauses, sentences) documenting a number of morphosyntactic phenomena in the languages of Europe (and including in some cases languages from the Mediterranean area). Its prospective users are typologists wanting to a...

Electronic databases are increasingly popular tools in typological research. Despite the advantages of such tools, there are problems connected both with their construction and with their standardization. For instance, there is generally a considerable gap between the information stored in typological databases and primary data: primary morphosyntactic data are much more difficult to handle com...

From a Darwinian point of view, taxonomic groups are understood as historical entities that arise at an evolutionary moment and that can always disappear. But these groups were also understood by many naturalists as natural kinds; in other words, as permanent, ahistorical types. I will explore some of the forms that this typological thought took, showing that this typological perspective neithe...