Diachronic change of prosodic structures, as it is encountered for instance in the history stress systems, has been described a slow process involving series minimal changes language’s grammar (Lahiri, 2015). We show that grammatical structures observed well domain name truncation (e.g. Italian hypocoristic formation: Francesca > France), where diachronic fast and therefore analyzable real t...

One central mystery of neural NLP is what neural models “know” about their subject matter. When a neural machine translation system learns to translate from one language to another, does it learn the syntax or semantics of the languages? Can this knowledge be extracted from the system to fill holes in human scientific knowledge? Existing typological databases contain relatively full feature spe...

Word-order typology often uses the linear order of binary grammatical pairs in sentences to classify a language. The present paper proposes a method based on dependency treebanks as a typological means. This paper investigates 20 languages using treebanks with different sizes from 16 K to 1 million dependencies. The results show that some languages are more head-initial or head-final than other...

The paper is focused on a systematic classification of assimilatory processes found in connected speech. It gives a complex typology of assimilations based on 17 different analytical perspectives yielding almost 60 different assimilation types. In addition to offering a detailed catalogue of assimilation processes occurring in connected speech, the typology may also be used as a tool for analyz...

The grammars of any OT typology can be derived from a single tableau in which each row, when asserted as optimal, delivers the grammar of a language in the typology. In the single-tableau representation, each candidate represents an entire language. When, as is typically the case, a typology is constructed from more than one candidate set, a single tableau representation may be built from the M...

Humans are equipped with some universal or language-specific abilities to recognize emotions. However, because of the different emotional contents in diverse languages and the relevant cultural differences, humans with different cultural backgrounds own different metapragmatical abilities to recognize and express emotions. A hypothesis concerning emotional effects about intonation and particle ...

In this paper we investigate a hypothesized cognitive bias for isomorphic mappings between conceptual structure and linear order in the noun phrase. This bias has been proposed as a possible explanation for a striking asymmetry in the typology of the noun phrase–linear orders which place the adjective closest to the noun, then the numeral, then the demonstrative, are over-represented in the wor...

The functional approach to typology often appeals to processing pressures in order to explain universals. This paper examines a case where the match between a processing asymmetry and a typological asymmetry is not one-to-one — a case where the functional approach appears to fail. For a particular typology of relative clauses, the psycholinguistic literature suggests two asymmetries: accessibil...