Speaking involves a process of selecting words and constructions which correspond to the thoughts that one wishes to express. Different languages place different constraints on this selection process, corresponding to their typological characteristics. In this paper we show how Swedish, French and Thai preferentially express motion events differently and suggest a theoretical framework with gro...

The paper presents a statistical evaluation of the typological data about color naming systems across the languages of the world that have been obtained by the World Color Survey. In a first step, we discuss a singular value decomposition of the categorization data that led to a small set of easily interpretable features dominant in color categorization. These features were used for a dimension...

43 cases of sound-symbolic palatalization were collected in a typological survey of babytalk registers, diminutive constructions, and other sound symbolic systems. Analysis of the typological trends and language particular examples reveals important differences between soundsymbolic expressive palatalization and phonologically motivated palatalization. We propose that the facts of sound-symboli...

Several typological gaps have attracted a lot of interest in the linguistic literature recently. These concern the Person Case Constraint and the absence of ABA patterns in adjectival gradation, pronoun suppletion, case syncretism, and singular noun allomorphy, among others. This paper is the first to provide a unified explanation of all these phenomena, and it does so via weakly non-inverting ...

The paper is devoted to the study of quantitative methods in linguistics and describes the studies conducted. The purpose is to give the general idea of these studies. The first one considers one of the principal logical categories—the quality. The basis of the research was comprised of lexicographical recourses. The text study finishes up the research. The second one dwells on the usage of the...

The aim of the Typological Database System project is the creation of a unified interface to numerous independently developed typological databases, which will allow the user to simultaneously query them from a single gateway. The main challenge behind the project lies in the great variability of the included data. In order to provide a unified interface the system will rely on detailed metadat...

In this paper, we present an application for formal concept analysis (FCA) by showing how it can help construct a semantic map for a lexical typological study. We show that FCA captures typological regularities, so that concept lattices automatically built from linguistic data appear to be even more informative than traditional semantic maps. While sometimes this informativeness causes unreadab...

We train a language-universal dependency parser on a multilingual collection of treebanks. The parsing model uses multilingual word embeddings alongside learned and specified typological information, enabling generalization based on linguistic universals and based on typological similarities. We evaluate our parser’s performance on languages in the training set as well as on the unsupervised sc...