In his Universal 14, Greenberg stated that the normal and dominant order in all world languages was to place the condition before the conclusion in conditional sentences. We take this claim to review it quantitatively and based on occurrences in real texts in more than 50 languages. We can see that Greenberg’s proposal is correct but that it needs a reformulation to be true at all. We propose a quantitatively based and updated Universal 14, which gives a better account of the representation of the different languages analyzed and which is fulfilled in 100% of the cases (as opposed to Greenberg’s 60% in our sample). In addition, we also analyze adverbial sentences. Once we obtain the occurrence data in their direction (before or after the main verb), we plot a new Universal in a typometrical way: 100% of the languages show a higher proportion of preceding conditional clauses than of adverbial clauses, regardless of their type or the direction preference for adverbial clauses. The relationship between the SOV type and a stricter initial conditional location is also proposed.

In this paper, we compare different ways to annotate both syntactic and morphological relations in a dependency treebank and we propose new formats we call mSUD and mUD, compatible with the Universal Dependencies (UD) schema for syntactic treebanks. We emphasize mSUD rather than mUD, the former being based on distributional criteria for the choice of the head of any combination, which allow us to clearly encode the internal structure of a word, that is, the derivational path. We investigate different problems posed by a morph-based annotation, concerning tokenization, choice of the head of a morph combination, relations between morphs, additional features needed, such as the token type differentiating roots and derivational and inflectional affixes. We show how our annotation schema can be applied to different languages from polysynthetic languages such as Yupik to isolating languages such as Chinese.

Descriptive grammars are highly valuable, but writing them is time-consuming and difficult. Furthermore, while linguists typically use corpora to create them, grammar descriptions often lack quantitative data. As for formal grammars, they can be challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a new method to extract and explore significant fine-grained grammar patterns and potential syntactic grammar rules from treebanks, in order to create an easy-to-understand corpus-based grammar. More specifically, we extract descriptions and rules across different languages for two linguistic phenomena, agreement and word order, using a large search space and paying special attention to the ranking order of the extracted rules. For that, we use a linear classifier to extract the most salient features that predict the linguistic phenomena under study. We associate statistical information to each rule, and we compare the ranking of the model’s results to those of other quantitative and statistical measures. Our method captures both well-known and less well-known significant grammar rules in Spanish, French, and Wolof.

This paper presents a new phonetic resource for Nigerian Pidgin, a low-resource language of West Africa. Aiming to provide a new tool for research on intonosyntax, we have augmented an existing syntactic treebank of Nigerian Pidgin, associating each orthographically transcribed token with a series of syllable-level alignments and phonetizations. Syllables are further described using a set of continuous and discrete prosodic features. This new approach provides a simple tool for researchers to explore the prosodic characteristics of various syntactic phenomena. In this paper, we present the format of the corpus, the various features added, and several explorations that can be performed using an online interface. We also present a prosodically specified lexicon extracted using this resource. In it, each orthographic form is accompanied by the frequency of its phoneme-level variants, as well as the suprasegmental features that most frequently accompany each syllable. Finally, we present several additional case studies on how this corpus can used in the study of the language’s prosody.

This paper describes a minimal topology driven parsing algorithm for topological grammars that synchronizes a rewriting grammar and a dependency grammar, obtaining two linguistically motivated syntactic structures. The use of non-local slash and visitor features can be restricted to obtain a CKY type analysis in polynomial time. German long distance phenomena illustrate the algorithm, bringing to the fore the procedural needs of the analyses of syntax-topology mismatches in constraint based approaches like for example HPSG.

This paper proposes a generic mathematical formalism for the combination of various structures: strings, trees, dags, graphs and products of them. The polarization of the objects of the elementary structures controls the saturation of the final structure. This formalism is both elementary and powerful enough to strongly simulate many grammar formalisms, such as rewriting systems, dependency grammars, TAG, HPSG and LFG.

This paper proposes a description of German word order including phenomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic dependency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without resorting to movement or similar mechanisms.