The German Grammar group develops a fully formalized and computer-processable set of grammars that share a set of constraints, that is, they have a common core (see also Müller, 2013 for an overview). Some very general con-straints hold for all grammars, some for subgroups of languages. Currently we work on: 1. German (Germanic, SFB 632, A6, Müller, 2007; Müller and Ørsnes, 2011), 2. Danish (Ge...

Luxembourgish is embedded in a multilingual context on the divide between Romance and Germanic cultures and has often been viewed as one of Europe’s under-resourced languages. We focus on the acoustic modeling of Luxembourgish. By taking advantage of monolingual acoustic seeds selected from German, French or English model sets via IPA symbol correspondances, we investigated whether Luxembourgis...

In this study, we investigate cross-linguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable. Based on a quantitative analysis of a range of spoken and written corpora, we identify clear and consistent patterns of change in the use of these ...

Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies Indo-European language family, using data syntactic structures. The two main sources are SSWL database and Longobardi’s recent parameters. We compute invariants estimates Euclidean distance functions for sets Germanic languages, a set Romance Slavic languages early compare results with what is...

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish SPEECH FRAMING EXPRESSIONS (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, wh...