Abstract This article investigates the evolutionary and spatial dynamics of typological characters in 117 Indo-European languages. We partition types change (i.e., gain or loss) for each variant according to whether they bring about a simplification morphosyntactic patterns that must be learned, are neutral neither simplifying nor introducing complexity) introduce more complex pattern. find cha...

This paper discusses the implementation of a knowledge-rich approach to automatic acquisition of grammatical information. Our study is based on Word Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff and Tudgell 2002). The original claims of WSE are two folded: that linguistic generalizations can be automatically extracted from a corpus with simple collocation information provided that the corpus is large enough; and t...

This squib aims to further our understanding of the relation between invariants of grammar and grammatical categories. Keenan and Stabler (2003) propose to formalize of the notion of ‘structural/ grammatical’ in terms of automorphism invariance, based on a very general notion of formal grammars (Bare Grammars). It is natural to think that category labels (more precisely: sets of language expres...

Automatic grammatical error detection for Chinese has been a big challenge for NLP researchers. Due to the formal and strict grammar rules in Chinese, it is hard for foreign students to master Chinese. A computer-assisted learning tool which can automatically detect and correct Chinese grammatical errors is necessary for those foreign students. Some of the previous works have sought to identify...

On the basis of neuropsychological and functional imaging evidence, meaning and grammatical class (particularly the verb-noun distinction) have been proposed as organizational principles of linguistic knowledge in the brain. However, previous studies investigating verb and noun processing have been confounded by the presence of systematic correlations between word meaning and grammatical class....

This study investigates grammatical gender and number processing marked on clitic pronouns in native Spanish speakers and in late English-Spanish bilinguals using ERPs. Spanish clitic pronouns were chosen as a critical grammatical structure which is absent in English, and which encodes both grammatical gender and number. Number, but not grammatical gender, is present in English, making this str...

Selective noun or verb deficits in word production observed in some aphasic patients have helped us understand how grammatical knowledge is represented in the brain (e.g., Bi, Han, Shu, & Caramazza, 2007; Caramazza & Hillis, 1991; see reviews in Laiacona & Caramazza, 2004; Shapiro & Caramazza, 2003a). It has been shown that such patients are not a coherent group but are produced by various caus...