From a Darwinian point of view, taxonomic groups are understood as historical entities that arise at an evolutionary moment and that can always disappear. But these groups were also understood by many naturalists as natural kinds; in other words, as permanent, ahistorical types. I will explore some of the forms that this typological thought took, showing that this typological perspective neithe...

Speaking involves a process of selecting words and constructions which correspond to the thoughts that one wishes to express. Different languages place different constraints on this selection process, corresponding to their typological characteristics. In this paper we show how Swedish, French and Thai preferentially express motion events differently and suggest a theoretical framework with gro...

The paper presents a statistical evaluation of the typological data about color naming systems across the languages of the world that have been obtained by the World Color Survey. In a first step, we discuss a singular value decomposition of the categorization data that led to a small set of easily interpretable features dominant in color categorization. These features were used for a dimension...

Several typological gaps have attracted a lot of interest in the linguistic literature recently. These concern the Person Case Constraint and the absence of ABA patterns in adjectival gradation, pronoun suppletion, case syncretism, and singular noun allomorphy, among others. This paper is the first to provide a unified explanation of all these phenomena, and it does so via weakly non-inverting ...

The paper is devoted to the study of quantitative methods in linguistics and describes the studies conducted. The purpose is to give the general idea of these studies. The first one considers one of the principal logical categories—the quality. The basis of the research was comprised of lexicographical recourses. The text study finishes up the research. The second one dwells on the usage of the...

The aim of the Typological Database System project is the creation of a unified interface to numerous independently developed typological databases, which will allow the user to simultaneously query them from a single gateway. The main challenge behind the project lies in the great variability of the included data. In order to provide a unified interface the system will rely on detailed metadat...

We train a language-universal dependency parser on a multilingual collection of treebanks. The parsing model uses multilingual word embeddings alongside learned and specified typological information, enabling generalization based on linguistic universals and based on typological similarities. We evaluate our parser’s performance on languages in the training set as well as on the unsupervised sc...

We motivate a model of human parsing and ambiguity resolution on the basis of psycholinguistic and typological data. Analysis of spoken and written corpora suggests that ambiguity is a factor in the choice of relativization strategy for English and supports the model’s predictions. Within an evolutionary account of language, we predict that languages will adapt over time so that prosodic and sy...