When developing NLP tools for low-resource languages, one is often confronted with the lack of annotated data. We propose to circumvent this bottleneck by training a supervised HMM tagger on a closely related language for which annotated data are available, and translating the words in the tagger parameter files into the low-resource language. The translation dictionaries are created with unsup...

This paper highlights the analogy of definiteness and possession by utilising the distinction between semantic and pragmatic as outlined in Löbners (2011) Concept Type and Determination approach. Assuming, on the basis of the features [± unique] and [± relational], a classification into the four logical types sortal, relational, individual, and functional concept, nouns will be used either in c...

This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French. These two languages are not perfect examples satellite-framed verb-framed languages, in Leonard Talmy’s well-known but they can nonetheless be shown differ a number related respects: compared (and other Germanic languages), French (like Romance languages) is quite constrained its use Manner-of-motio...

It is well known that children acquiring Germanic and Romance languages go through an early stage at which they produce declarative sentences with a Root Infinitive (cf. (1)) which would be ungrammatical in the adult language (Stern & Stern 1928, Weverink 1989, Pierce 1992, Wexler 1994). For languages outside of these language families, little work has been done on such Root Infinitives. In the...

In this paper, we present a syntactic approach to the annotation of bridging relations, socalled genitive bridging. We introduce the RuGenBridge corpus for Russian annotated with genitive bridging and compare it to the semantic approach that was applied in the Prague Dependency Treebank for Czech. We discuss some special aspects of bridging resolution for Russian and specifics of bridging annot...

In this paper Brill's rule-based PoS tagger is tested and adapted for Hungarian. It is shown that the present system does not obtain as high accuracy for Hungarian as it does for English (and other Germanic languages) because of the structural difference between these languages. Hungarian, unlike English, has rich morphology, is agglutinative with some inflectional characteristics and has fairl...

Abstract Semantic variation in the cutting and breaking domain has been shown to be constrained across languages a previous typological study, but it was unclear whether Japanese an outlier this domain. Here we revisit Japonic language area by collecting new naming data for 40 videoclips depicting events Standard Japanese, highly divergent Tohoku dialects, as well four related Ryukyuan (Amami, ...

A graanmar tbrmalism, Field and Category Grammar ar (FCG), is described, which beside constituent structure and functional structure recognizes a level of field structure. It is argued that the formalism offers descriptive and computational advantages for the analysis of Scandinavian and other languages that distinguish clause types topologically. It is also argued that the clear distinction be...

Abstract This article examines the lexically parallel English and German constructions can’t stand somebody/something jemanden/etwas nicht ausstehen können “not tolerate (someone or something)”, from synchronic, diachronic, quantitative perspectives. Syntactic semantic restrictions suggest that usage of in relevant sense is older than other semantically similar verbs (e.g. , leiden ), while evi...