There are approximately 7000 languages spoken in the world today. This diversity reflects the legacy of thousands of years of cultural evolution. How far back we can trace this history depends largely on the rate at which the different components of language evolve. Rates of lexical evolution are widely thought to impose an upper limit of 6000-10,000 years on reliably identifying language relat...

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 ...

Conventional discussions on the VO/OV typology highlight two perceived "exceptions" in Chinese word order, particularly concerning placement of relative clauses and adpositional phrases. In this paper, we argue that these seemingly exceptional order patterns align with broader linguistic tendencies language rather than being genuine deviations from typological norms. To demonstrate this, analyz...

Some language types are more frequent among the world’s languages than others, and the field of linguistic typology attempts to elucidate the reasons for such differences in type frequency. However, there is no consensus in that field about the stochastic processes that shape these frequencies, and there is thus likewise no agreement about the expected probability distribution of typological fr...

Abstract The present study compares two Indo-Aryan languages, Sadri and Konkani, with respect to their morphological complexity. Based on assumptions made in sociolinguistic typology (e.g., Trudgill, 2011), which forms part of a larger research program investigating the effects social factors language structures, this attempts reconstruct various aspects prehistoric society based structures the...

This paper looks at negation in Finnish dialects from a typological perspective. The focus is on standard negation, i.e. the negation of declarative verbal main clauses. The dialectal variation that Finnish shows in its negative construction is examined in the light of current typological knowledge of the expression of negation. Developmental trends connected to the micro-typological variation ...

One of the basic principles in establishing a genetic grouping of languages is that typological traits must be excluded from consideration at the initial stage of establishment; only substantive traits (form-meaning pairings) are relevant. Yet typological evidence is still frequently appealed to in recent discussions of the methodology for establishing genetic classifications and in recent prop...