Linguists have long been producing grammatical decriptions of yet undescribed languages. This is a time-consuming process, which has already adapted to improved technology for recording and storage. We present here a novel application of NLP techniques to bootstrap analysis of collected data and speed-up manual selection work. To be more precise, we argue that unsupervised induction of morpholo...

This paper describes a system for morphological tagging and gloss-ing of Sesotho, a southern Bantu language. Sesotho has a rich agglu-tinative morphology, and morphemes cannot be disambiguated on the basis of the bigram or trigram statistics that work so well for languages like English. Our system estimates a simple PCFG for Sesotho clauses from a small hand-annotated corpus in an unsupervised ...

A long-standing area of interest in phonological theory has been the analysis of processes that exhibit action at a distance. Consider for example a nasal harmony process in Tshiluba (Bantu; Johnson 1972:75–76, Odden 1994:301), where the applicative suffix (among others) normally contains an l (1a), which is realized instead as n when attached to a stem that contains a nasal (1b). In Tshiluba a...

The necessity to document thousands of endangered languages encourages the collaboration between linguists and computer scientists in order to provide the documentary linguistics community with the support of automatic processing tools. The French-German ANR-DFG project Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier (BULB) aims at developing such tools for three mostly unwritten African languages of t...

In this paper we explore the development of the morphosyntax-semantics interface by comparing development in 4 typologically diverse languages: Dutch (a Germanic V2 language), Greek, Italian (a Romance pro-drop language) and Swahili (a Bantu language), with particular emphasis on Swahili, a relatively understudied language whose morphosyntactic structure is particularly relevant to the question...

Recognizing spoken language involves automatic activation of multiple candidate words. The process of selection between candidates is made more efficient by inhibition of embedded words (like egg in beg) that leave a portion of the input stranded (here, b). Results from European languages suggest that this inhibition occurs when consonants are stranded but not when syllables are stranded. The r...

This paper provides a semantic analysis of the D(eterminer)-system in Nata (Eastern Bantu), and compares it with strikingly similar D-system St’át’imcets (Salish). Our core proposal is that both languages, major distinction encoded by Ds correlates presence vs. absence speaker commitment to existence referent for noun phrase.We show neither nor encode well-known distinctions like definiteness o...

Abstract Nominal expressions in the Bantu languages have extraordinary typological characteristics. Their word order patterns are extremely diverse and some of attested crosslinguistically very rare, or even unique. The same diversity can be found number agreement marker paradigms. Equally remarkable prosodic idiosyncrasies at level nominal expressions, especially existence boundaries associate...

Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Besides the long-standing presence of indigenous Kx’a-speaking foragers and the more recent arrival of Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested that other pre-Bantu communities were also present in the Nami...