This article presents an overview of the goals and methods of semantic typology, the study of the distribution of semantic categories across languages. Results from this field inform theoretical accounts of syntax-semantics interface phenomena, as well as the nature of the relationship between language and cognition. This article discusses a variety of quantitative methods that represent recent...

This article presents an overview of the goals and methods of semantic typology, the study of the distribution of semantic categories across languages. Results from this field inform theoretical accounts of syntax-semantics interface phenomena, as well as the nature of the relationship between language and cognition. This article discusses a variety of quantitative methods that represent recent...

Previous analytic results (Griffiths & Kalish, 2007) show that repeated learning and transmission of languages in populations of Bayesian learners results in distributions of languages which directly reflect the biases of learners. This result potentially has profound implications for our understanding of the link between the human language learning apparatus and the distribution of languages i...

Arguably, grammars which associate natural language expressions not only with a syntactic but also with a semantic representation, should do so in a way that capture paraphrasing relations between sentences whose core semantics are equivalent. Yet existing semantic grammars fail to do so. In this paper, we describe an ongoing project whose aim is the production of a “paraphrastic grammar” that ...

Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels, while most—but not all—languages have an [u] sound. In this paper we present the first probabilistic treatment of a basic question in phonological typology: ...

This paper presents a morphological classification of languages from the IR perspective. Linguistic typology research has shown that the morphological complexity of each language of the world can be described by two variables, index of synthesis and index of fusion. These variables provide a theoretical basis for IR research handling morphological issues. A common theoretical framework is neede...

OBJECTIVES To cope with medical terms, which present a high variability of expression through a single natural language, in the sense that any term may be reformulated in hundred of different ways. METHODS A typology of term variants is presented as a systematic approach in order to favour the implementation of an exhaustive solution. Then, an algorithm able to handle all variants is designed...

In this chapter, we explore how different languages describe events of putting things in places, and how children begin to talk about such events in their very early multi-word utterances. Our aim in focusing on the domain of “putting” events is to allow us to identify some important semantic and psycholinguistic factors that influence the course of acquisition. The overarching question is to d...

The question of how to compare languages and more generally the domain of linguistic typology, relies on the study of different linguistic properties or phenomena. Classically, such a comparison is done semi-manually, for example by extracting information from databases such as the WALS. However, it remains difficult to identify precisely regular parameters, available for different languages, t...