After an overview of some recent work on prosodic typology, both tonal and rhythmic, it is argued that both symbolic and numeric computational methods are required in order to advance the field by using large annotated resources and developing consistent, precise and evaluable models. Symbolic modelling is illustrated with reference to the lexical and grammatical tone systems of West African la...

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the relationship between linguistic typology and formal grammar—a relationship that has existed for several decades now and is unlikely to disappear any time soon. As the reader will see, the two orientations differ in a number of respects, but they share the custody of language, and that motivates the need for communication between the two....

In semantic typology, it is desirable to have quick and easy access to crosslinguistic elicitations describing stimuli from a semantic domain. We explore the use of crowdsourcing for obtaining such data, and compare it with fieldwork data obtained through in-person elicitations. Despite potential concerns about the quality of crowdsourced data, we find no difference in the amount of between-lan...

Human language abilities are far richer than what is represented in the kinds of monolingual corpora that are standardly used to evaluate statistical models of language learning. This article summarizes a series of findings from language acquisition, crosslanguage typology, and language processing, that illustrate the challenges that any serious model of natural language syntax must meet. Even ...

A problem which arises in the theory of the error-driven ranking model of the acquisition of phonotactics is that the faithfulness constraints need to be promoted but should not be promoted too high. This paper motivates this technical problem and shows how to tune the promotion component of the re-ranking rule so as to keep the faithfulness constraints at bay. Sections 1-2 introduce the algori...

Starting from a typology of argumentative forms proposed in linguistics by Apothéloz, and observing that the four basic forms can be organized in a square of oppositions, we present a logical language, somewhat inspired from generalized possibilistic logic, where these basic forms can be expressed. We further analyze the interplay between the formulas of this language by means of two hexagons o...

Language production processes can provide insight into how language comprehension works and language typology-why languages tend to have certain characteristics more often than others. Drawing on work in memory retrieval, motor planning, and serial order in action planning, the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account links work in the fields of language production, typology, and com...