Defying chronology: Crosslinguistic variation in reverse order reports

A noisy-channel account of crosslinguistic word-order variation.

The distribution of word orders across languages is highly nonuniform, with subject-verb-object (SVO) and subject-object-verb (SOV) orders being prevalent. Recent work suggests that the SOV order may be the default in human language. Why, then, is SVO order so common? We hypothesize that SOV/SVO variation can be explained by language users' sensitivity to the possibility of noise corrupting the...

On the Site of Morphology and Crosslinguistic Variation

Defying bacteriophages

Adaptations by hosts in response to parasitism are generally believed to reduce the susceptibility of the adapted individual. However, recent work on Escherichia coli showed that bacteria can fight deadly phage attacks by committing altruistic suicide upon infection, in order to prevent parasite transmission to nearby relatives. Here, we compare the efficiency of suicidal host defense with indi...

Subwords in reverse-complement order

We examine finite words over an alphabet Γ = {

Crosslinguistic research