Abstract On the basis of a sample 424 languages or dialects, this article provides typological-comparative investigation designations for three major internal organs torso, ‘heart’, ‘liver’, and ‘lungs’. While colexification patterns are relatively unconstrained, data show skewing in morphologically complex terms: ‘heart’ ‘liver’ often serve as head nouns terms ‘lungs’, but reverse is rare. Ano...

This paper investigates whether Information Theory (IT) in the tradition of Shannon (1948) and in particular the “Uniform Information Density Hypothesis” (UID, see Jäger 2010) might contribute to our understanding of a phenomenon called “article omission” (AO) in the literature. To this effect, we trained language models on a corpus of 17 different text types (from prototypically written text t...

This paper combines a corpus-based study of noun+verb collocations with an attempt to distinguish compositional, regularly formed compounds from lexicalised ones. We claim that morphologically regular, compositional compounds share most of their collocational preferences with their compound heads, whereas lexicalised compounds have their own collocational preferences, distinct or only marginall...

The present study discusses typology and variation of word order patterns in nominal verb structures across 20 Chinese languages compares them with another 43 from the Sino-Tibetan family. methods employed are internal external historical reconstruction correlation studies linguistic sociolinguistics. results show that head-final tendency is a baseline family, but individual differ by degree he...

In this paper we consider the morphosyntax of so-called prepositions (PrePs) in 4 Amharic. It is typologically anomalous that Amharic should have prepositions, since it is otherwise 5 a fairly canonical head-final language. Instead, we argue that the PrePs are really morphological 6 prefixes that express the oblique case assigned to NP by a postposition (null or overt). What is 7 somewhat unusu...

The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagné & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of semantic categories, rather than individual conce...

This paper is concerned with the incremental interpretation of exophoric referring descriptions with relative gradable adjectives, such as the description in the instruction ‘Pick up the tall glass’. Relative adjectives such as ‘tall ’ are typically considered subsective with respect to the denotation of the head noun and thus pose a challenge to incremental approaches that operate strictly fro...

In this paper we investigate how case features are represented and processed during language comprehension. To this end, we explored the phenomena of case attraction in German in a series of four experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgment procedure. Case attraction leads to errors that are akin to subject-verb agreement errors intensively studied in English and other languages (e.g. Bo...