Although Max Schmidt’s thesis focuses on the expansion of Arawak cultures, language consistently looms in the background of Schmidt’s work as an important marker of cultural affinity and symptom of cultural influence. As a consequence, linguistics -and linguistic classification in particular -plays an important role in Schmidt’s thesis. In this chapter I discuss the role played by linguistics i...

In this paper, we discuss our creation of a web corpus of spoken Hindi (COSH), one of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken mainly in the Indian subcontinent. We also point out notable problems we’ve encountered in the web corpus and the special concordancer. After observing the kind of technical problems we encountered, especially regarding annotation tagged by Shiva Reddy’s tagger, we argue how the...

Chomsky (1965; 1986) has long stressed the significance of the fact that children can acquire any human language. This linguistic phenomenon is a central motivation in the search for language universals. The claims of generative grammar underline the importance of documenting the full range of language diversity while typologically distinct languages still exist. Such documentation is necessary...

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that ...

This paper shows that linguistic techniques along with machine learning can extract high quality noun phrases for the purpose of providing the gist or summary of email messages. We describe a set of comparative experiments using several machine learning algorithms for the task of salient noun phrase extraction. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study: (i) the modifiers of a noun phr...

Many real-world decision making problems require multiple criteria which can be from different nature. This implies to define a heterogeneous context with different types of information that experts will use to provide their assessments. But sometimes, experts do not have enough knowledge or information to assess the criteria and they hesitate to express their assessments. Therefore, in this co...

Sentiment polarity classification is perhaps the most widely studied topic. It classifies an opinionated document as expressing a positive or negative opinion. In this paper, using movie review dataset, we perform a comparative study with different single kind linguistic features and the combinations of these features. We find that the classic topicbased classifier(Naive Bayes and Support Vecto...

OBJECTIVES The notion that patterns of linguistic and biological variation may cast light on each other and on population histories dates back to Darwin's times; yet, turning this intuition into a proper research program has met with serious methodological difficulties, especially affecting language comparisons. This article takes advantage of two new tools of comparative linguistics: a refined...

I approach my topic here from a somewhat different perspective than that of several other contributors to the present volume. To be clear, my knowledge of the Romance languages and their comparative grammar is quite limited, and my knowledge of their histories even more so. e discussion below, with some limited exceptions, is thus not based on detailed historical and comparative analyses, but r...

The revival of Hebrew is so far the most successful known reclamation of a sleeping tongue and is a language movement that has been in progress for more than 120 years. By comparison, language revival movements in Australia are in their infancy. This paper provides comparative insights and makes information about the Hebrew revival accessible to Australian linguists and Aboriginal revival activ...