Proceeding from the assumption that all languages are equally complex, there exists a corollary, widely held but poorly documented, herein referred to as the negative correlation hypothesis. It states: if one component of language is simplified then another must be elaborated. Here, this assumption is reformulated in terms of a scientific hypothesis and subjected to statistical analysis. Thirty...

The relationship between organisations' value system and their human resource management (HRM) system is investigated surveying human resource managers in 443 Australian organisations. Organisations were grouped into four main value types Elite, Leadership, Meritocratic and Collegial, according to a typological theory of organisational values (Kabanoff, 1991a,b, 1993). MANOVA and discriminant a...

In this paper I explore the logical range of sentential negation types predicted by the theory of HPSG. I find that typological surveys confirm that attested simple negation strategies neatly line up with the types of lexical material given by assuming Lexical Integrity and standard Phrase Structure Grammar dependencies. I then extend the methodology to bipartite negation and derive a space of ...

We propose that topic models can be used to represent the relationship among linguistic typological features. Typological features are typically analyzed in terms of universal implications. We argue that topic models can better capture some phenomena, such as universal tendencies, which are hard to be explained by implications. We conduct experiments to evaluate the predictive accuracy of our H...

Current work on universal dependency schemes in NLP does not make reference to the extensive typological research on language universals, but could benefit since many principles are shared between the two enterprises. We propose a revision of the syntactic dependencies in the Universal Dependencies scheme (Nivre et al. [16, 17]) based on four principles derived from contemporary typological the...

“species can be regarded as nature-given and not as language-constituted natural kinds.” His analysis is somewhat complex and given through a short history of the notion of species, distinguishing morphological species, typological species and species as populations. Concerning species as populations the author observes that, unlike typological species (and morphological ones), a species concei...

This paper describes the Pavia Typological Database (PTD), a follow-up to the MED-TYP database (Sansò 2004). The PTD is an evergrowing repository of primary linguistic data (words, clauses, sentences) documenting a number of morphosyntactic phenomena in the languages of Europe (and including in some cases languages from the Mediterranean area). Its prospective users are typologists wanting to a...