Recent research suggests that modelling pronunciation variation is more appropriate at the syllable level than at the level of contextdependent phones. Due to the large number of factors affecting syllable pronunciation, the creation of multi-path topologies is nec­ essary. Previous research on multi-path models in connected digit recognition has proved trajectory clustering to be an attractive...

A particular meaning can be realized by morphosyntactically distinct expressions across languages. One of the challenges for cross-linguistic research is to account for convergence in meaning in light of morphosyntactic variation. This paper examines cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tense in temporal adjunct clauses (TACs, e.g. English John crossed the street...

The past half-century has witnessed remarkable growth in the study of language variation, and it has now become a highly productive subfield of research in sociolinguistics. This section considers the locus of variability within language and discusses the linguistic variable as a heuristic construct in the analysis and the description of language variation. It further discusses the nature of sy...

Giuseppe Longobardi is Anniversary Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science of the University of York. He has worked in theoretical and comparative syntax, with a special interest in the study of the structural correspondence of meaning. The structure of nominal expressions and the syntax of negation and negative quantifiers are two of the most prominent top...

This paper concerns the adaptation of automatic speech recognisers to new speakers. Existing recognisers, in their training and adaptation, treat between-speaker variation essentially as acoustic 'noise' and ignore s tructuring which originates at higher levels, caused for instance by accent differences. If a large-vocabulary recogniser is to cope efficiently with a realistic range of speakers ...

The paper provides cross-linguistic measurements of everyday language use based on the C-ORAL-ROM multilingual corpus of spontaneous speech. The average and the variation coefficient of a series of standard parameters are provided, faced to the main sociological and structural contexts of spoken language use. Mid-Length of Utterances (MLU); Mid-Length of the dialogic turn (MLTw); Speed; Mid len...

In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the DutchGerman state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today’s pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In ...

In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the DutchGerman state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today’s pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In ...

In this position paper, I argue that in order to create truly language-independent NLP systems, we need to incorporate linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge in question is not intricate rule systems, but generalizations from linguistic typology about the range of variation in linguistic structures across languages.