In recent work with Warren Maguire and Paul Heggarty, we have been exploring the possibilities for quantitative phonetic comparison of English accents. Currently, the ‘Sound Comparisons’ project (www.soundcomparisons.com) includes over 90 varieties of modern English. In some localities, up to three sub-varieties are also included to illustrate the potential of these techniques of comparison for...

In this thesis proposal I present my thesis work, about preand postprocessing for statistical machine translation, mainly into Germanic languages. I focus my work on four areas: compounding, definite noun phrases, reordering, and error correction. Initial results are positive within all four areas, and there are promising possibilities for extending these approaches. In addition I also focus on...

Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize topic from comparative perspective, connection Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses Romance, Germanic, Slavic other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic simil...

The German Grammar group develops a fully formalized and computer-processable set of grammarsthat 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. D...

A central question regarding the syntax-semantics interface is the extent to which semantic primitives correspond one-to-one with syntactic primitives. Den Dikken (1995) proposed that all possession structures can be derived from an underlying locative structure, extending the work of Freeze (1992). This paper argues that such a unified approach is untenable, as there are possession expressions...

In this paper I develop an analysis of the alternation between verb-third (V3) and verb-second (V2) in the older West Germanic languages in terms of information-structural considerations. I present the situation in Old English and Old High German as well as new data from Old Saxon, proposing on the basis of this data that there were (at least) two possible left-peripheral targets for verb-movem...

This study focuses on (1) Turkic languages in the Altaic branch of Ural-Altaic language group Asian languages, and also (2) Kurdish Indo-Iranian dialects which are spoken Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, as well (3) English Germanic European group. The syntax-cases tenses investigated. Four simple tenses, namely present, present continuous, past future tense examined individually...