Sign languages are the natural languages of deaf people and deaf communities. In the past 50 years, an impressive number of sign languages have come to be studied from a modern linguistic perspective, generating ground-breaking insights into the influence of the communicative channel on language structure. However, only a handful of these studies concern sign languages on the African continent....

In this paper, the set-theoretic approach in the logical theory of normative systems is extended using Broome’s definition of the normative code function. The syntax and semantics for first order metanormative language is defined, and metanormative language is applied in the formalization of the basic principles in Broome’s approach and in the construction of a logical typology of normative sys...

Natural languages (NL) can be classified as prepositional or postpositional based on the order of the noun phrase and the adposition. Categorizing a language by its adposition typology helps in addressing several challenges in linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Understanding the adposition typologies for less-studied languages by manual analysis of large text corpora can be quit...

The paper gives an overview of a typology of dialogue acts used for annotating Estonian spoken dialogues. Several problems of the classification and determining of dialogue acts are considered. Our further aim is to develop a dialogue system which can interact with the user in natural language following the norms and rules of human-human communication.

The paper presents a method for identifying problems of usersystem interaction. Based on a consolidated set of 24 principles of cooperative spoken human-machine dialogue, the paper then proposes and illustrates a general typology of non-cooperative system dialogue behaviour for use in spoken language dialogue analysis and evaluation.

In this position paper, I argue that in order to create truly language-independent NLP systems, we need to incorporate linguistic knowledge. The linguistic knowledge in question is not intricate rule systems, but generalizations from linguistic typology about the range of variation in linguistic structures across languages.

We extend crisp measures of disarray to the vaguely defined context of natural languages, so as to tackle problems of linguistic typology related to the order of words. We deal both with short abstract structure of the type “subject verb object”, and with texts in the original language and in a translation. Preliminary experimental results are provided.

In V2 languages subject-verb inversion is followed by obligatory topicalisation, in VSO languages it is not. I propose that verb movement in V2 languages is self-attachment, while in VSO languages it is adjunction to a VP-external head. This analysis makes predictions on typology, language acquisition and change. Evidence comes mainly from Welsh, Breton, and Early Swedish.

The Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation offers several constructs for describing intonation. On the basis of data on language typology and language acquisition, this paper tries to sort out those constructs that because of their added semantic import should be characterized as phonemic, from the phonetic ones, which being language-specific as well, lead to variation without added se...

This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spontaneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boundary tones are enhanced to mark information structuring. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic...