The present paper addresses the study of non-arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non-arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence-processing neural networks are trained in a set…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

In this paper, the patterns of semantic extensions of allative markers are compared with those of ablative markers from a cognitive-typological perspective. Despite the symmetry the two notions appear to exhibit semantically, goal and source exhibit asymmetry and the prevalence of the former over the latter can be seen in a wide range of…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…

This paper investigates the extent to which productive use of formulaic sequences by intermediate students of two typologically different languages, i.e., English and Spanish, is associated with their oral proficiency in these languages. Previous research (e.g., Boers et al., "Language Teaching Research" 10: 245-261, 2006) has shown that…

In order to correlate the two it is proposed to examine both the kinds of contribution that sociolinguistics might make in the study of comparative education, and the light comparative studies in education might throw on apparent anomalies in sociolinguistics research. (Author)