2 Acknowledgements I thank my professors and mentors Ralf Vogel and Miriam Butt. Ralf Vogel provided me constantly with support and encouragement. I benefited a lot from the discussions with him. He was the person who evoked my interest in syntax and OT and impressed me with his prompt and insightful analysis of linguistic data. Furthermore, I thank Miriam Butt for her professional comments and...

This paper reports a phenomenon supporting the hypothesis that the emergence of structure in the evolution of language was a staged process. To develop a grammatical structure it seems necessary to first have discrete constituents which can be the building blocks of a hierarchical system. By analysing observed speech we show that the development of a linear sequence of grammatical constituents ...

In this paper I propose a general approach to the study of constraints on cooccurrence of grammatical categories and present one case study of a functionally infelicitous combination from the domain of TAM categories, the present perfective. It is argued that constraints on co-occurrence of particular categories can be accounted for in terms of local markedness and markedness hierarchies. This ...

undoubtedly the holy quran is a unique book in arabic language, eloquently and rhetorically. its words are a pure collection of arabic literature. all poets, jurisprudents and philosophers believe it as a master art. it is a permanent treasure of arabic and for it many sciences have been generated. it kept the arabic language active and dynamic during ups and downs of the history. it also conta...

We present a new statistical framework for stochastic grammatical inference algorithms based on a state merging strategy. We propose to use multinomial statistical tests to decide which states should be merged. This approach has three main advantages. First, since it is not based on asymptotic results, small sample case can be specifically dealt with. Second, all the probabilities associated to...