Journal articles on the topic 'Structural-typological features of languages'
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1
Seifart, Frank. "Does Structural-Typological Similarity Affect Borrowability?" Language Dynamics and Change 5, no. 1 (2015): 92–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00501004.
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This study addresses the question whether the borrowability of linguistic forms, in particular affixes, is constrained by structural properties of the donor and recipient languages involved. According to some claims, structural similarity favors affix borrowing. On some accounts, structural compatibility of a certain kind is even a precondition for affix borrowing. This study tests these claims using data from a set of 78 languages that borrowed between one and 50 affixes, taken from the AfBo database (Seifart, 2013a). The extent of affix borrowing in this set of languages is compared with structural similarity scores for the donor and recipient languages involved, obtained from morphosyntactic features provided in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2011). Results suggest that structural similarity between a (potential) donor and recipient language plays at best a minor role in determining the extent of affix borrowing. This supports the view that bilingual speakers are not—at least not strongly—constrained by structural factors of the languages they speak when creating mixed varieties of these languages, resulting in contact-induced language change.
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Mallaeva, Zulaikhat Magomedovna. "STRUCTURAL AND TYPOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE AVAR LANGUAGE SENTENCE." Herald of the G. Tsadasa Institute of Language, Literature and Art, no. 27 (September 22, 2021): 6–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.31029/vestiyali27/1.
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The article examines the relationship between the semantics of a sentence and its grammatical structure. The complexity of the research is due to the following factors: 1) the lack of own research methods for the grammat-ical structure of the sentence; 2) the absence of more or less fully explicated concepts and terms for the study of the semantics of the sentence. In the Dagestan languages of the ergative typology, such structural types of sentences are presented, which differ both in terms of content and in terms of grammatical design of this content. The peculiarities of the syntactic structure of the language of the Dagestan languages cannot be investigated without establishing the regular connections that exist between the structural types of the sentence and the logical content of the sentence, on the one hand, and between the semantics of the sentence and a special grammatical form of representation of this content, on the other hand.
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Salokhiddinov, Manuchehr, and Oybek Rabimov. "Comparative analysis of language typology and its tasks." Общество и инновации 2, no. 12/S (February 5, 2022): 319–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.47689/2181-1415-vol2-iss12/s-pp319-322.
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Comparative language typology is part of the general typology of linguistics. She studies systems of two or more languages, certain categories of languages in a deductive way (from external to internal). Comparative linguistic typology, as the concept itself shows, is a linguistic subject of typology based on the method of comparison. Comparative typology can equally consider only dominant or common features, as well as only distinctive features that occur in languages of the same structural type (synthetic, analytical, agglutinative, etc.) or in languages of different structural types (synthetic and analytical, agglutinative and incorporated, etc.). The classification of the main essential features of languages, and their most important characteristics and patterns, are the subject of comparative linguistic typology. The task of comparative linguistic typology is to create general typological rules and concepts by comparing linguistic phenomena of different languages. Classification of the main essential features of languages, the most important characteristics and regularities are the subject of comparative typology. The task of Comparative Typology is to create General typological rules and conceptions by comparing linguistic phenomena of various languages.
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Ponti, Edoardo Maria, Helen O’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulić, Roi Reichart, Thierry Poibeau, Ekaterina Shutova, and Anna Korhonen. "Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing." Computational Linguistics 45, no. 3 (September 2019): 559–601. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00357.
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Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world’s languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that suffer from the lack of human labeled resources. We present an extensive literature survey on the use of typological information in the development of NLP techniques. Our survey demonstrates that to date, the use of information in existing typological databases has resulted in consistent but modest improvements in system performance. We show that this is due to both intrinsic limitations of databases (in terms of coverage and feature granularity) and under-utilization of the typological features included in them. We advocate for a new approach that adapts the broad and discrete nature of typological categories to the contextual and continuous nature of machine learning algorithms used in contemporary NLP. In particular, we suggest that such an approach could be facilitated by recent developments in data-driven induction of typological knowledge.
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Park, Hyunji Hayley, Katherine J. Zhang, Coleman Haley, Kenneth Steimel, Han Liu, and Lane Schwartz. "Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysis." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 9 (March 17, 2021): 261–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00365.
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Abstract Prior studies in multilingual language modeling (e.g., Cotterell et al., 2018; Mielke et al., 2019) disagree on whether or not inflectional morphology makes languages harder to model. We attempt to resolve the disagreement and extend those studies. We compile a larger corpus of 145 Bible translations in 92 languages and a larger number of typological features.1 We fill in missing typological data for several languages and consider corpus-based measures of morphological complexity in addition to expert-produced typological features. We find that several morphological measures are significantly associated with higher surprisal when LSTM models are trained with BPE-segmented data. We also investigate linguistically motivated subword segmentation strategies like Morfessor and Finite-State Transducers (FSTs) and find that these segmentation strategies yield better performance and reduce the impact of a language’s morphology on language modeling.
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Donahue, Mark. "A typological investigation of Nepalese languages." Gipan 4 (December 31, 2019): 30–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/gipan.v4i0.35454.
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The languages of Nepal are established as belonging to four families, with the recent addition of Austroasiatic speakers in the east. This paper moves away from language classification into genealogical families, and examines the classification of the languages of Nepal by examining their morphosyntactic features and applying computational methods.
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Grant, Anthony P., and Diana Guillemin. "The complex of creole typological features." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27, no. 1 (February 28, 2012): 48–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.27.1.02gra.
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This paper presents morphosyntactic and sentential information on Mauritian Creole (MC), a French-lexifier creole which has been underrepresented in many studies of Creole morphosyntactic typology. Typological features from Holm & Patrick (2007), Bickerton (1981, 1984), Taylor (1971, 1977), Markey (1982), and Dryer (1992), most of which have previously been assembled as being diagnostic of a language’s creole status, are presented here with examples from contemporary MC. MC sentences from sets of comparative creolistic sentences in Hancock (1975, 1987) are presented in Appendix A. The material demonstrates abundantly that MC exhibits the vast majority of features which have been deemed typical of creole languages over the past four decades.
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Abdullabekova, Umsalimat Bagautdinovna. "Structural-typological description of beekeeping terms in the Kumyk, Russian and English languages." Филология: научные исследования, no. 5 (May 2021): 81–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.7256/2454-0749.2021.5.35345.
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The subject of this research is the word-forming structure of beekeeping terms in the Kumyk, Russian and English languages. The article describes the distinctive features of terminological word formation in the area of “beekeeping” in the aforementioned languages. For determining the type of word formation, the author uses the number and composition of the components. The similarities in common literary and terminological word formation are identified. It is demonstrated that in the corresponding terminology of the Kumyk language prevail the terminological phrases. The prevalence of phrases in the languages under reviews is explained by the fact that the term not only denotes the concept, but to a certain extent reflects to its content. This requires the creation of mainly terms-phrases that can reflect the characteristics of the concept to the fullest. On the other hand, the growing number of terminological phrases in the Kumyk language indicates that beekeeping terms in the Kumyk language are translated from the Russian language, therefore part of the terms first appear as a result of clarification of their meaning. Whole terms comprise approximately 30% of all terms of the corpus. These terms are naturally included in the terminological phrases as the nuclear words and defining in the terminological phrases. In beekeeping terminology of tge Kumyk and English languages, prevail N/R + N/R models, which the authors believe is a reflection of common literary word formation.
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Chilingaryan, Kamo Pavelovich. "Fusional and agglutinative features in declension system in the Russian and Armenian languages (a diachronic aspect)." Litera, no. 6 (June 2021): 116–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8698.2021.6.35737.
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The subject of this research is the typological characteristics of declension system in the Russian and Armenian languages and their diachronic changes. The author compares the modern Armenian and Grabar (classical Armenian) language, as well as Old East Slavic and modern Russian language. The goal of this article is to determine typological peculiarities of grammatical case systems of the Russian and Armenian languages in their current state, taking into account the vectors of evolutionary development of these systems in the history of the two languages. Research methodology leans on the traditional concepts of morphological typology and systemic analysis of language types proposed by G. P. Melnikov. It is established that unlike the Russian language, the Armenian declension system contains certain agglutinative and analytical features. Emphasis is placed on the detailed analysis of these phenomena and explanation of their consistent nature. The acquired results are valuable for typological description of the Russian and Armenian languages, as well as for teaching these languages to non-native speakers. The presented materials broaden scientific representations on multifacetedness of development of fusional declension on the example of two quite different languages within the same language family.
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DWIVEDI, Amitabh Vikram. "Bhadarwahi: A Typological Sketch." Acta Linguistica Asiatica 5, no. 1 (June 30, 2015): 125–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/ala.5.1.125-148.
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This paper is a summary of some phonological and morphosyntactice features of the Bhadarwahi language of Indo-Aryan family. Bhadarwahi is a lesser known and less documented language spoken in district of Doda of Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir State in India. Typologically it is a subject dominant language with an SOV word order (SV if without object) and its verb agrees with a noun phrase which is not followed by an overt post-position. These noun phrases can move freely in the sentence without changing the meaning of the sentence. The indirect object generally precedes the direct object. Aspiration, like any other Indo-Aryan languages, is a prominent feature of Bhadarwahi. Nasalization is a distinctive feature, and vowel and consonant contrasts are commonly observed. Infinitive and participle forms are formed by suffixation while infixation is also found in causative formation. Tense is carried by auxiliary and aspect and mood is marked by the main verb.
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Каксин, А. Д. "EVIDENTIALITY IN THE TURKIC LANGUAGES: THE TYPOLOGICAL VIEW." SCIENTIFIC REVIEW OF SAYANO-ALTAI, no. 3(31) (January 17, 2022): 22–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.52782/kril.2021.3.31.004.
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В статье рассматриваются особенности выражения категории эвиденциальности в тюркских языках. Выделены значения достоверности, неочевидности и неожиданного обнаружения. Равномерное рассредоточение средств выражения по всем языковым уровням признано основным формальным признаком эвиденциальной системы тюркских языков. В этом смысле тюркские языки контрастируют с языками, в которых большая функциональная нагрузка ложится на лексические средства (как, например, в русском языке). Приводятся краткие сведения еще об одном типе языков по исследуемому признаку: его представляют языки, имеющие парадигму особого наклонения - эвиденциалиса (некоторые уральские). С типологической точки зрения весь представленный в тюркских языках комплекс искомых значений и средств их выражения признан особым типом эвиденциальной системности. The article deals with the features of the expression of the category of evidentiality in the Turkic languages. The values of confidence, non - obviousness, and unexpected detection are highlighted. The uniform distribution of the means of expression across all language levels is recognized as the main formal feature of the evidential system of the Turkic languages. In this sense, the Turkic languages contrast with languages in which a large functional load falls on lexical means (as, for example, in Russian). Brief information is given about another type of language according to the studied feature: it is represented by languages that have a paradigm of a special mood - evidentialis (some Uralic). From the typological point of view, the whole complex of the desired meanings and means of their expression presented in the Turkic languages is recognized as a special type of the evidential system.
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Ifaturoti, Adeboye Oluwaseun. "Краткий очерк типологических особенностей языка йоруба." Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, no. 7 (2021): 74–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.22250/2410-7190_2021_7_1_74_85.
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The article presents materials on the phonetic and grammatical structure of Yoruba – one of the most widely spoken languages of West Africa, which, along with its literary form, exists in many dialectical variants. Using examples selected from modern normative speech usage, the author – a native speaker of the Standard Yoruba – demonstrates the ways of expressing semantic content, various grammatical meanings and categories in the Yoruba language, whose structure has significant differences from known modern analytical (English, French) and synthetic (Russian) languages of Europe. The results of the study show that, first, lexical meanings in Yoruba language can be differentiated by changing tone pitch; second, reduplication and agglutination are vital to the process of word formation; third, the categories of verb tense, definiteness / indeterminacy, comparative and superlative adjectives are expressed by lexical means; finally, syntactic constructions due to the non-inflectional nature of words in Yoruba, as in European analytical languages, are constructed according to a fixed model.
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Gruzdeva, Ekaterina, and Juha A. Janhunen. "Notes on the Typological Prehistory of Ghilyak." International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 2, no. 1 (August 5, 2020): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/25898833-12340022.
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Abstract This paper discusses the typological evolution of Ghilyak (Nivkh), a small “Palaeo-Asiatic” language family also known as Amuric, distributed in the Amur-Sakhalin region of the Russian Far East. In some respects, especially in the phonology, morphophonology, and phonotactics, Ghilyak shows features absent in the other languages of the region, most of which represent the so-called “Altaic” areal-typological complex. At the same time, Ghilyak shares with its neighbours several “Altaic” features, especially in the morphosyntax, including suffixally marked number and case, as well as nominalized and converbialized verbs. An analysis of the data shows that Ghilyak has been affected by at least two processes of typological transformation which have, either successively or in parallel, both “Altaicized” and “de-Altaicized” its linguistic structure. The reasons of these transformations can be sought in the substratal, adstratal, and superstratal impact of the neighbouring “Altaic” and “non-Altaic” languages. This allows us to place the typological prehistory of Ghilyak in a context shared by other languages of the North Pacific Rim, notably Tungusic and Koreanic.
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Gusev, Valentin. "Towards a typological profile of the North Siberian substrate." Voprosy Jazykoznanija, no. 5 (2021): 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/0373-658x.2021.5.26-58.
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The paper deals with a number of typologically rare features present in the languages of Northern Siberia (Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Ewenki, Neghidal, Ewen, to some extent also Yukaghir and Chukchi); these features are: interrogative mood of the verbs, intraclitics, nominal tense, polysemy ‘real’ / ‘autochtonous’. They are absent in the languages spoken to the south, including other Uralic and Tungusic languages, thus being of clearly areal character. On the other hand, none of the existing languages can be regarded as a source of these features, so that their origin must be due to a common substrate. Interestingly, all the four features are well attested in the Eskaleut languages. These features allow us to make some hypotheses about the typological profi le of the languages spoken in Northern Siberia about 1000–2000 years ago. They must have been diff erent from the Uralo-Altaic type, but probably were typologically close to the present-day Eskaleut (Unangan-Yupik-Inuit).
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Szeto, Pui Yiu, Jackie Yan-ki Lai, and Umberto Ansaldo. "Creole typology is analytic typology." Language Ecology 3, no. 1 (June 12, 2019): 89–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/le.17003.sze.
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Abstract This paper reviews a number of specific features typical of analytic languages, in an attempt to investigate whether Creole languages can indeed be grouped, at least structurally, with other languages of the analytic (or isolating) type. Based on Sybesma et al. (forthcoming), a study of the nature of analyticity, we select eight features which constitute rather obvious structural parallels between two unrelated groups, namely Sinitic and Kwa. In terms of Creole languages, these eight features can be also clearly located within the APiCS (Michaelis et al. 2013). Contrary to works like Bakker et al. (2011) which argue for the existence of a “Creole Prototype”, our results show that Creole languages do not cluster with each other against other non-Creole languages. Instead, various Creoles clearly owe their grammatical profile to the languages that dominate the typological environment in which they are formed.
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Cheremisinova, M., and Yu Lander. "‘Other’: typological observations." Rhema, no. 4, 2018 (2018): 109–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.31862/2500-2953-2018-4-109-124.
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The paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation into specific characteristics of the expressions translated as ‘other’. We discuss the appearance of ‘other’ expressions at a periphery of nominal phrases or before nouns in right-branching languages, their occasional incompatibility with determiners and certain peculiarities in the expression of number. The features discussed suggest that ‘other’ expressions are in many respects similar to determiners, even though they should not necessarily be treated as such.
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FILIPPOV, ANDREI K., and KONSTANTIN A. FILIPPOV. "COMPOSITIONAL FEATURES OF TWO 18TH CENTURY SPECIALIZED TEXTS (A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON GERMAN AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES)." Cherepovets State University Bulletin 4, no. 97 (2020): 188–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.23859/1994-0637-2020-4-97-17.
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A comparison of structural and compositional characteristics of the German agricultural manual Oeconomus Prudens et Legalis (1702) and its Russian translation Florinova Ekonomiya (‘Florin’s Economy’, 1738) demonstrates differences in the heading systems, chapter structure, in the use of font highlights and ways of integrating illustrations into the text. These data are used for describing some typological features of special texts in Germany and Russia of the 18th century.
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Prince, Kilu von, and Anna Margetts. "Expressing possibility in two Oceanic languages." Studies in Language 43, no. 3 (November 18, 2019): 628–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.18051.pri.
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Abstract In this paper, we offer the first detailed description of expressions of possibility in the Oceanic languages Daakaka and Saliba-Logea. We show that in these languages basic expressions of possibility are bi-clausal. This suggests that, depending on their intended scope, typological studies of modal expressions may need to consider grammaticalized bi-clausal structures which have typically been excluded in studies of this domain based on their structural complexity. Relevant features to consider bi-clausal constructions as basic, grammaticalized expressions of possibility include their frequency, semantic specificity, and paradigmatic relationship with other modal expressions. The findings presented here are based on the analysis of original corpus data and targeted fieldwork.
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FILPPULA, MARKKU. "The rise of it-clefting in English: areal-typological and contact-linguistic considerations." English Language and Linguistics 13, no. 2 (July 2009): 267–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674309003025.
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Recent areal and typological research has brought to light several syntactic features which English shares with the Celtic languages as well as some of its neighbouring western European languages, but not with (all of) its Germanic sister languages, especially German. This study focuses on one of them, viz. the so-called it-cleft construction. What makes the it-cleft construction particularly interesting from an areal and typological point of view is the fact that, although it does not belong to the defining features of so-called Standard Average European (SAE), it has a strong presence in French, which is in the ‘nucleus’ of languages forming SAE alongside Dutch, German, and (northern dialects of) Italian. In German, however, clefting has remained a marginal option, not to mention most of the eastern European languages which hardly make use of clefting at all. This division in itself prompts the question of some kind of a historical-linguistic connection between the Celtic languages (both Insular and Continental), English, and French (or, more widely, Romance languages). Before tackling that question, one has to establish whether it-clefting is part of Old (and Middle) English grammar, and if so, to what extent it is used in these periods. In the first part of this article (sections 2 and 3), I trace the emergence of it-clefts on the basis of data from The York–Toronto–Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose and The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. Having established the gradually increasing use of it-clefts from OE to ME, I move on to discuss the areal distribution of clefting among European languages and its typological implications (section 4). This paves the way for a discussion of the possible role played by language contacts, and especially those with the Celtic languages, in the emergence of it-clefting in English (section 5). It is argued that contacts with the Celtic languages provide the most plausible explanation for the development of this feature of English. This conclusion is supported by the chronological precedence of the cleft construction in the Celtic languages, its prominence in modern-period ‘Celtic Englishes’, and close parallels between English and the Celtic languages with respect to several other syntactic features.
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Yurayong, Chingduang, and Pui Yiu Szeto. "Altaicization and De-Altaicization of Japonic and Koreanic." International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 2, no. 1 (August 5, 2020): 108–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/25898833-12340026.
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Abstract This article discusses 40 grammatical features in Japonic and Koreanic in relation to their neighbouring languages in Northeast Asia. The data comprise 66 modern language varieties of 13 different linguistic affinities, and 12 historical languages (including Old and Middle Japanese and Old and Middle Korean). The results generated from a computational phylogenetic tool show a significant distance in the typological profiles of three main clades: Northeast Asian, Japonic-Koreanic, and Sinitic spheres. Typologically, the Japonic and Koreanic languages form a common grammatical type by sharing up to 26/40 features. By tracing their attestation in the historical languages we can see that the converged grammars are likely to be results of typological Altaicization and de-Altaicization. The combination of linguistic and historical evidence points to a chronology in which Japonic and Koreanic had mutually converged by Altaicization and de-Altaicization, respectively, during the 1st millennium BC and AD before eventually diverging in the 2nd millennium AD.
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Gisborne, Nikolas. "Aspects of the morphosyntactic typology of Hong Kong English." English World-Wide 30, no. 2 (June 11, 2009): 149–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.30.2.03gis.
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English and Cantonese are the main two languages in contact in Hong Kong, together with some other minority Sinitic languages and a variety of Austronesian languages spoken by domestic helpers. Cantonese and English are typologically dissimilar in terms of word order, tense, mood and aspect marking, noun phrase structure, relative clause formation, the formation of interrogatives, and argument structure. Yet there is no work which systematically explores how these morphosyntactic typological differences are revealed in Hong Kong English (HKE). This paper explores how a typological perspective facilitates an analysis of the expression of finiteness in HKE, a significant feature because it subsumes a number of other typological facts. The analysis claims that HKE is a new English variety where the typology of the substrate is more directly responsible for the morphosyntactic features under analysis than the typology of the lexifier
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Wang, Dingquan, and Jason Eisner. "Surface Statistics of an Unknown Language Indicate How to Parse It." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 6 (December 2018): 667–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00248.
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We introduce a novel framework for delexicalized dependency parsing in a new language. We show that useful features of the target language can be extracted automatically from an unparsed corpus, which consists only of gold part-of-speech (POS) sequences. Providing these features to our neural parser enables it to parse sequences like those in the corpus. Strikingly, our system has no supervision in the target language. Rather, it is a multilingual system that is trained end-to-end on a variety of other languages, so it learns a feature extractor that works well. We show experimentally across multiple languages: (1) Features computed from the unparsed corpus improve parsing accuracy. (2) Including thousands of synthetic languages in the training yields further improvement. (3) Despite being computed from unparsed corpora, our learned task-specific features beat previous work’s interpretable typological features that require parsed corpora or expert categorization of the language. Our best method improved attachment scores on held-out test languages by an average of 5.6 percentage points over past work that does not inspect the unparsed data (McDonald et al., 2011), and by 20.7 points over past “grammar induction” work that does not use training languages (Naseem et al., 2010).
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Gilman, Charles. "African Areal Characteristics." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 33–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.1.1.04gil.
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Two arguments against the influence of African languages as an explanation for the typological similarities among the Afro-European Pidgins and Creoles have been the variety of the African languages and the unlikelihood that a single substrate language would have contributed the same feature to so many different languages, each with its own history. It is demonstrated that many of the features widespread among Afro-European languages are equally widespread among African languages, regardless of their genetic affiliations. They are thus legitimately regarded as at the same time African and Atlantic Creole areal features. They encompass the local varieties and require no single substrate or group of substrates to explain their appearance among Afro-European languages. The large number of examples and their wide geographical extension is evidence for the validity of the areal explanation. It is expected that further research will increase the number of examples, as well as demonstrate their even greater frequency among African languages. Universal and genetic explanations of resemblance should be supplemented by the areal hypothesis, which explains African influence as resulting from very common and widely distributed features, rather than to a single substrate language or group of languages.
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Ammar, Waleed, George Mulcaire, Miguel Ballesteros, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith. "Many Languages, One Parser." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 4 (December 2016): 431–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00109.
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We train one multilingual model for dependency parsing and use it to parse sentences in several languages. The parsing model uses (i) multilingual word clusters and embeddings; (ii) token-level language information; and (iii) language-specific features (fine-grained POS tags). This input representation enables the parser not only to parse effectively in multiple languages, but also to generalize across languages based on linguistic universals and typological similarities, making it more effective to learn from limited annotations. Our parser’s performance compares favorably to strong baselines in a range of data scenarios, including when the target language has a large treebank, a small treebank, or no treebank for training.
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Efremov, D. A., and Z. Sziráki. "Serial postpositions in the Udmurt language and function words in the Kazakh language (comparative analysis)." BULLETIN of the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University.Political Science. Regional Studies. Oriental Studies. Turkology Series. 138, no. 1 (2022): 202–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.32523/2616-6887/2022-138-1-202-207.
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Postpositions in many languages have evolved from significant words through grammaticalization. In the Udmurt language, as in many other Finno-Ugric languages of Russia, they are divided, separated into two groups: serial and non-serial postpositions. In the Kazakh language, function words are divided into two groups: function words and postpositions. The subject of our study was serial postpositions of the Udmurt language and function words of the Kazakh language, since in the essence of these categories of words there are similar features. The conclusion suggests itself - these two categories of words, although they are denoted by different terms, clearly show a striking typological similarity. In both languages, these categories of words occupy a middle position between nominals (mostly nouns) and postpositions. Nouns have their own independent lexical meaning, have the ability to decline, take possessive suffixes, and the postpositions have lost their original (lexical) meaning, so they perform only grammatical functions, just like case affixes, only, unlike the latter, they are a separate word and do not adjoin nominal basis. This circumstance can be explained from the point of view of the morphological (typological) classification of languages - both languages belong to agglutinative languages.
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Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda. "Subsystem interface and tone typology in Papiamentu." Language Change in Contact Languages 33, no. 2 (May 15, 2009): 437–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.33.2.08riv.
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This paper looks at the relations between tone and features from other phonological subsystems in Papiamentu. It proposes that the interaction of tonal features with features from stress and intonational subsystems provides important clues about the typological classification of Papiamentu as a tone language. Moreover, the taxis of tones, or their organization in the string, also provides a better understanding of this language. Papiamentu fits the description of tone-restricted languages but also exhibits features of intonational systems.
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Plag, Ingo. "Creolization and admixture." Creoles and Typology 26, no. 1 (February 17, 2011): 89–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.26.1.04pla.
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Proponents of a ‘feature pool’ approach to creolization (e.g. Mufwene 2001, Aboh & Ansaldo 2006) have claimed that the emergence of the new grammar is driven by the syntax-discourse prominence, markedness, and frequency of available features, with typological similarity or dissimilarity of the languages involved playing a crucial role in the competition and selection process. This paper takes a closer look at the predictions of a feature pool-based approach to creolization and tests whether these predictions are borne out by the facts. Three case studies from the Surinamese creoles and Sri Lanka Malay show that the feature pool approach suffers from a number of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical problems. The typology alone of the languages involved in the contact is not a good predictor for the outcome of language contact. The feature pool approach neglects processing constraints: one can only select from what one can process. ‘Creolization’, as in the case of the emergence of the Surinamese Creoles, is not ‘exceptional’, but happens in contact situations in which second language acquisition plays a significant role. The processing restrictions inherent in second language acquisition play an important role in shaping the structural outcome. ’Admixture’, as in the case of Sri Lanka Malay, is not ‘exceptional’ either, but happens in different situations and shows different processes at work. And these processes allow structural outcomes that are very different from those found under the conditions of second language acquisition.
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Zaytseva, N. Yu, and S. G. Kurbatova. "ISOMORPHISM AND ALLOMORPHISM OF ROMANCE TERMINOLOGICAL WORD COMBINATIONS." Bulletin of Udmurt University. Series History and Philology 29, no. 6 (December 25, 2019): 953–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2412-9534-2019-29-6-953-961.
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The article reflects the main results of comparative-typological study concerning the organization of terminological phrases on the basis of four closely related languages - French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian. Attention is focused on the study of theme-rheme organization of phrases on the material of multilingual and bilingual dictionaries in some of the most priority areas of electronics and electrical engineering. Despite the isomorphism of the studied languages, the complex use of a number of methods (comparative-typological method, quantitative analysis, actual division method, questioning of specialist informants) allowed to detect several allomorphic features in the theme-rheme organization of their word combinations. They consist in the use of possessive and definite articles, prepositions, and ordinal numbers. The presence of possessive articles in the Romanian language is recognized as the most striking allomorphic property, thanks to which theme-rheme organization of a Romanian word-combination becomes more transparent in comparison with other Romance languages. The importance of the study of allomorphic features of languages for lexicography, theory and practice of translation is emphasized.
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Tang, Marc, and One-Soon Her. "Insights on the Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin generalization: Quantitative typological data on classifiers and plural markers." Folia Linguistica 53, no. 2 (November 26, 2019): 297–331. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/flin-2019-2013.
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Abstract This paper offers quantitative typological data to investigate a revised version of the Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin generalization (GSSG), which states that (a) a language is unlikely to have both sortal classifiers and morphosyntactic plural markers, and (b) if a language does have both, then their use is in complementary distribution. Morphosyntactic plurals engage in grammatical agreement outside the noun phrase, while morphosemantic plurals that relate to collective and associative marking do not. A database of 400 phylogenetically and geographically weighted languages was created to test this generalization. The statistical test of conditional inference trees was applied to investigate the effect of areal, phylogenetic, and linguistic factors on the distribution of classifiers and morphosyntactic plural markers. The results show that the presence of classifiers is affected by areal factors as most classifier languages are concentrated in Asia. Yet, the low ratio of languages with both features simultaneously is still statistically significant. Part (a) of the GSSG can thus be seen as a statistical universal. We then look into the few languages that do have both features and tentatively conclude that part (b) also seems to hold but further investigation into some of these languages is needed.
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Sodikov, Qosimjon. "COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MANUSCRIPTS “MUHOKAMAT UL-LUG‘ATAYN” AND THE ISSUE OF WORK VARIANCE." ALISHER NAVOIY INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL 1, no. 1 (January 30, 2021): 92–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.26739/2181-1490-2021-1-10.
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Muhokamat ul-lug‘atayn is a great discovery of Alisher Navoi in linguistics. In this work, he began the field of typological study of languages in world linguistics by comparing languages belonging to different families. In the play, Navoi highlighted the lexical-stylistic, phono-stylistic, morpho-stylistic aspects of the old Uzbek language, the poetic possibilities in fiction, as well as its linguocultural, linguocognitive features.
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Wichmann, Søren, and Arpiar Saunders. "How to use typological databases in historical linguistic research." Diachronica 24, no. 2 (December 21, 2007): 373–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.24.2.06wic.
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Several databases have been compiled with the aim of documenting the distribution of typological features across the world’s languages. This paper looks at ways of utilizing this type of data for making inferences concerning genealogical relationships by using phylogenetic algorithms originally developed for biologists. The focus is on methodology, including how to assess the stability of individual typological features and the suitability of different phylogenetic algorithms, as well as ways to enhance phylogenetic signals and heuristic procedures for identifying genealogical relationships. The various issues are illustrated by a small sample of empirical data from a set of Native American languages.
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Wang, Dingquan, and Jason Eisner. "Fine-Grained Prediction of Syntactic Typology: Discovering Latent Structure with Supervised Learning." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 5 (December 2017): 147–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00052.
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We show how to predict the basic word-order facts of a novel language given only a corpus of part-of-speech (POS) sequences. We predict how often direct objects follow their verbs, how often adjectives follow their nouns, and in general the directionalities of all dependency relations. Such typological properties could be helpful in grammar induction. While such a problem is usually regarded as unsupervised learning, our innovation is to treat it as supervised learning, using a large collection of realistic synthetic languages as training data. The supervised learner must identify surface features of a language’s POS sequence (hand-engineered or neural features) that correlate with the language’s deeper structure (latent trees). In the experiment, we show: 1) Given a small set of real languages, it helps to add many synthetic languages to the training data. 2) Our system is robust even when the POS sequences include noise. 3) Our system on this task outperforms a grammar induction baseline by a large margin.
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Sviridova, Larisa, and Truong Thi Xuan Huong. "TYPOLOGICAL FEATURES OF ANTROPONYM FUNCTIONINGIN LANGUAGES OF DIFFERENT STRUCTURES(THE VIETNAMESE, RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES)." Bulletin of the Moscow State Regional University (Linguistics), no. 5 (2017): 170–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.18384/2310-712x-2017-5-170-180.
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Klein, Thomas B. "Typology of creole phonology." Creoles and Typology 26, no. 1 (February 17, 2011): 155–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.26.1.06kle.
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This paper reports on the analysis of a typological database of creole phoneme inventories and surface syllables. The sample encompasses a balanced set of creole languages lexified by Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The results of the analysis demonstrate that most creole languages exhibit between twenty and thirty-seven contrastive segments, between five and seven phonemic vowel qualities, and between two and three stop series. No creoles show only CV, and many display CCVC surface syllables. These features are quite unremarkable in comparison with non-creole languages around the world, but they represent significant evidence against claims that the structure of creole languages is especially simple. Instead, creole languages cluster in the typological middle.
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Zheng, Jianyu, and Ying Liu. "Probing language identity encoded in pre-trained multilingual models: a typological view." PeerJ Computer Science 8 (March 15, 2022): e899. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.899.
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Pre-trained multilingual models have been extensively used in cross-lingual information processing tasks. Existing work focuses on improving the transferring performance of pre-trained multilingual models but ignores the linguistic properties that models preserve at encoding time—“language identity”. We investigated the capability of state-of-the-art pre-trained multilingual models (mBERT, XLM, XLM-R) to preserve language identity through language typology. We explored model differences and variations in terms of languages, typological features, and internal hidden layers. We found the order of ability in preserving language identity of whole model and each of its hidden layers is: mBERT > XLM-R > XLM. Furthermore, all three models capture morphological, lexical, word order and syntactic features well, but perform poorly on nominal and verbal features. Finally, our results show that the ability of XLM-R and XLM remains stable across layers, but the ability of mBERT fluctuates severely. Our findings summarize the ability of each pre-trained multilingual model and its hidden layer to store language identity and typological features. It provides insights for later researchers in processing cross-lingual information.
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Tsarova, Iryna. "Peculiar Features of Terms Word Combinations in the Criminal Code of Ukrainian Language." Terminological Bulletin, no. 5 (2019): 206–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.37919/2221-8807-2019-5-28.
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The article analyzes the structural models of terminological phrases of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The essence of the phenomenon of the term “terminological phrases” is determined; attention is paid to the fact that terminological phrases are noted by the constant character of the structure. The paper describes the features of legal language as a specialized system of legal concepts, which provides communication needs in the field of legal science and practice. Attention is focused on the study of the semantic structure of the Ukrainian legal terms. From this perspective it is important to make complex typological analysis of the term system of the Ukrainian language legal on the basis of termmaking processes of the modern world. The researches of the Ukrainian legal borrowings of terminological legal system of term elements of other languages due to different historical conditions and traditions are connected with mentioned above is the result of from above research. Term-words by lexical and grammatical affiliation are divided into nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Terminological phrases can be two-, three-, four- and multi-component “criminal prosecution”.
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Lü, Shanshan. "Two locative constructions in Caijia from the typological perspective of Asian languages." Studies in Language 42, no. 3 (October 19, 2018): 600–640. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.17045.lu.
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Abstract This paper sets out to examine two locative constructions found in Caijia, an unclassified language with many Sinitic features spoken in Guizhou province of China, using the framework of Ameka & Levinson’s (2007) typology of locative predicates (basic locative construction [blc]). These are the locative verb construction and the positional verb construction, both of which are used to answer the question ‘Where is the X?’. The different syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints on the usage of these two main constructions are described and analyzed in detail as well, while the locative verb construction is identified as the basic locative construction. The present paper also studies the core constituents in these two constructions, for example, localizers, which serve to indicate a relative spatial relation between two entities and for whose nominal nature we argue in this paper, a locative verb whose source is ‘live, dwell’, and two types of positional verbs. Even though Caijia is a language very close in its characteristics to Sinitic languages, this study demonstrates certain unusual features, atypical for Sinitic. We also show that Caijia does not bear out all the predictions proposed by Ameka & Levinson for the locative verbs in the languages of the single locative type, nor does it entirely conform with the hierarchy for the blc encoding (Ameka & Levinson 2007).
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Danylenko, Andrii. "Ukrainian in the Language Map of Central Europe: Questions of Areal-Typological Profiling." Journal of Language Contact 6, no. 1 (2013): 134–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/19552629-006001008.
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The paper deals with the areal-typological profiling of Ukrainian among languages of Europe, constituting Standard Average European (SAE) and especially Central European (CE). Placed recently in the context of the ‘areal typology’ and the ‘dynamic taxonomy’, Ukrainian together with Russian and Belarusian appear to be mere replica languages. Such languages are capable of only borrowing surface structures migrating all over the Europe unie or imitating deep structures on the model of SAE or CE. In order to elaborate on an alternative profiling of Ukrainian among languages of (Central) Europe, the author concentrates on both phonological and morphosyntactic features treated commonly as CE Sprachbund-forming (the spirantization of *g, the dispalatalization of the palatalized consonants, the existence of medial l, the umlauting, the three-tense system, including a simple preterit from the perfect, and the periphrastic ‘ingressive’ future). As a result, the author advances another vector of areal classification, thus positioning Russian in the core of ‘Standard Average Indo-European’ and (Southwest) Ukrainian as an intermediate language between Russian and the rest of (Central) European languages.
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Murawaki, Yugo. "Bayesian Learning of Latent Representations of Language Structures." Computational Linguistics 45, no. 2 (June 2019): 199–228. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00346.
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We borrow the concept of representation learning from deep learning research, and we argue that the quest for Greenbergian implicational universals can be reformulated as the learning of good latent representations of languages, or sequences of surface typological features. By projecting languages into latent representations and performing inference in the latent space, we can handle complex dependencies among features in an implicit manner. The most challenging problem in turning the idea into a concrete computational model is the alarmingly large number of missing values in existing typological databases. To address this problem, we keep the number of model parameters relatively small to avoid overfitting, adopt the Bayesian learning framework for its robustness, and exploit phylogenetically and/or spatially related languages as additional clues. Experiments show that the proposed model recovers missing values more accurately than others and that some latent variables exhibit phylogenetic and spatial signals comparable to those of surface features.
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Smolka, Eva, and Dorit Ravid. "What is a verb?" Mental Lexicon 14, no. 2 (December 31, 2019): 169–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.00003.int.
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Abstract Verbs constitute one of the basic building blocks of a clause, setting the structure of arguments and expressing the relationships among nouns in various thematic roles. In general terms, verbs are lexical items expressing verb-oriented notions such as activities, processes, and states. In morphology-rich languages, the syntactic and lexical roles of verbs are mediated by typologically-oriented morphological means. The current Special Issue contrasts the structure and functions of verbs in languages from two morphologically rich, yet typologically different families. The articles in the Special Issue present spoken and written aspects of verbs in usage and development in German (a Germanic language) on the one hand, in Hebrew, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic (Semitic languages), on the other. From a theoretical linguistic perspective, we ask how the different typological features of these languages affect the function of verbs in sentences, and from a psycholinguistic perspective, we ask how typological differences affect the processing of verbs in the mature minds of adults and in the developing minds of children.
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Olshtain, Elite. "Is Second Language Attrition the Reversal of Second Language Acquisition?" Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11, no. 2 (June 1989): 151–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263100000589.
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The study of language attrition, whether it is concerned with first or second languages, focuses on the effects resulting from an individual's reduced use of the attrited language. Such reduction in use can be due to a change in the linguistic environment or to the termination of an instructional program. In either case, some other language (or languages) is or becomes the dominant one.The present article reports on a series of studies, all focusing on individual attrition of English as a second language (ESL) in an environment where Hebrew is the dominant language. The predictor variables discussed are age, sociolinguistic features, input variables, and linguistic variables. The attrition process affecting English as a second language in a Hebrew dominant context seems to exhibit two major trends of change in language use: (a) a greater variability in the application of peripheral and highly marked structural rules, and (b) lower accessibility of specific lexical items. In each of these trends one can identify a limited reversal of the acquisition process, particularly with young children (5–8-year-olds) as well as a typological transfer process from the dominant language.
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Gerner, Matthias. "Deictic Features of Demonstratives: A Typological Survey with Special Reference to the Miao Group." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 54, no. 1 (March 2009): 43–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100001043.
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AbstractThis article is centred on the concept of the deictic feature embedded in demonstratives. A principled taxonomy of deictic features attested cross-linguistically is proposed, with the aim of being as comprehensive as possible. The list of deictic features previously identified is greatly expanded to include 15 features, with which 52 deictic values are associated. The morphological strategies for encoding deictic features in demonstratives are also examined. Three techniques are identified: (i) isolating; (ii) agglutinative or serial; and (iii) inflectional encoding. A number of the deictic features discussed in this article, along with their morphological realization strategies, are illustrated with data from the Miao Group of languages, spoken in the People’s Republic of China.
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Moncunill Martí, Noemí, and Javier Velaza Frías. "Iberian." Palaeohispanica. Revista sobre lenguas y culturas de la Hispania Antigua, no. 20 (May 1, 2020): 591–629. http://dx.doi.org/10.36707/palaeohispanica.v0i20.370.
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Iberian is the best documented of all Palaeohispanic languages —it has the richest and most varied corpus, the longest chronology of attestation and largest territorial extension—, and yet it also remains one of the most enigmatic. As for its typological classification, it is considered to be an agglutinative language which may present ergative features; however, its hypothetical relationship with other languages, ancient or modern, is still uncertain. This paper presents the main ongoing lines of research and the most widely accepted hypotheses on the Iberian language and its written culture, placing special emphasis on current problems of interpretation and the main challenges ahead.
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Otaboyevna, Kunduz Saparova. "Comparative typological features of segmental phono-stylistic means in words of foreign language origin in Russian and Uzbek languages." Linguistics and Culture Review 5, S3 (August 2, 2021): 111–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.21744/lingcure.v5ns3.1398.
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This research is devoted to the analysis of stylistic peculiarities of phonovariants of words of foreign origin in Russian and Uzbek. It is aimed at the investigation of the stylistic values of phonovariants of the borrowed words in the Russian and Uzbek languages and substantiation of the isomorphic and allomorphic features of such language units in comparison. So as to achieve the aim of the research, several objectives of the research are set: identification of the current status of the research problem; review of related literature; analysis of stylistic peculiarities of phonovariants of the words of foreign origin in compared languages; substantiation of isomorphism and allomorphism of honostylistic features of borrowed words in Russian and Uzbek; discussion of stylistic potential of phonovariants of the words of foreign origin in compared languages.
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Zinnatullina, Liliia. "Phraseological equivalents in the English and Russian languages." Litera, no. 8 (August 2021): 134–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8698.2021.8.36258.
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This article is dedicated to examination of phraseological equivalents in the English and Russian languages. An attempt is made to determine the criteria for finding phraseological equivalents in the English and Russian languages. The subject of this research is the peculiarities of various types of English-Russian phraseological equivalents. Referring to the research of outstanding scientists, the article describes and analyzes the types of phraseological equivalents in the English and Russian languages. The author provides the examples of a range of phraseological units of the English and Russian languages, selected from the Phraseological Dictionary of the Russian Language, Russian National Corpus, and British National Corpus. Contextual method and method of phraseological description are used for studying English-Russian phraseological equivalents. The scientific novelty of this paper consists in the full or partial manifestation of phraseological equivalence of a number of unique phraseological units in the English and Russian languages leaning on the conducted research of compositional volume. The conclusion is made that the adverbial phraseological units-equivalents are characterized by an exact match of phraseological meaning, structural-grammatical organization, imagery framework, and thus, compositional volume. For determining the degree of match of the structural-grammatical organization, it is essential to consider the specific typological features, which are typical for one language and atypical for another due to difference in the systems of the compared languages. Partial phraseological equivalence of adverbial phraseological units is characterized by the exact match of plane of content and insignificant differences in the plane of expression, which do not affect the identity of imagery of the English and Russian adverbial phraseological unit.
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Ibragimovich, Ikromov Oybek. "Individual typological features of students’ memory in the context of learning foreign languages." ACADEMICIA: An International Multidisciplinary Research Journal 10, no. 12 (2020): 1723–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.5958/2249-7137.2020.01962.x.
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Viberg, Åke. "The lexical typological profile of Swedish mental verbs." Languages in Contrast 5, no. 1 (September 30, 2005): 121–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lic.5.1.09vib.
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The lexical typological profile of a language is a crosslinguistically valid characterization of its lexical structure with particular focus on basic features which are language-specific. The paper deals with basic mental verbs in Swedish from this perspective based on data from translation corpora against the background of available information about typological patterns. A brief sketch is given of language-specific characteristics of the nuclear verb se ‘see’ which is the primary equivalent of English see but is also frequently used as an equivalent of look used as an activity verb (look at) and as a phenomenon-based verb (e.g. look happy). The extensive pattern of polysemy of the verb känna ‘feel’ is dealt with in detail and turns out to have several language-specific characteristics even in comparison with closely related languages such as German and English. Swedish veta is shown to have a more restricted extension beyond its basic meaning than its primary English equivalent know. English in this case appears to represent a more common pattern than Swedish judging from available typological data. A major section is also devoted to the semantic differentiation between the three basic verbs of thinking tänka-tro-tycka which represents one of the major language-specific characteristics of Swedish mental verbs.
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Klafka, Josef, and Daniel Yurovsky. "Characterizing the Typical Information Curves of Diverse Languages." Entropy 23, no. 10 (October 2, 2021): 1300. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23101300.
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Optimal coding theories of language predict that speakers will keep the amount of information in their utterances relatively uniform under the constraints imposed by their language, but how much do these constraints influence information structure, and how does this influence vary across languages? We present a novel method for characterizing the information structure of sentences across a diverse set of languages. While the structure of English is broadly consistent with the shape predicted by optimal coding, many languages are not consistent with this prediction. We proceed to show that the characteristic information curves of languages are partly related to a variety of typological features from phonology to word order. These results present an important step in the direction of exploring upper bounds for the extent to which linguistic codes can be optimal for communication.
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Parkvall, Mikael. "How European is Esperanto?" Language Problems and Language Planning 34, no. 1 (April 1, 2010): 63–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.34.1.04par.
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The typological similarities between Esperanto and other languages have long been a matter of debate. Assuming that foreign-language structures are more easily acquired when they resemble those of the learner’s native tongue, any candidate for a global lingua franca obviously ought to be as typologically neutral as possible. One common criticism of Esperanto is that it is ‘too European,’ and thus less accessible to speakers of non-European languages. In order to provide a more solid base for such discussions, this paper makes an attempt to quantify the Eurocentricity of Esperanto, employing the features catalogued in the World Atlas of Language Structures. It is concluded that Esperanto is indeed somewhat European in character, but considerably less so than the European languages themselves.
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Zhao, Yiyun, and Masha Fedzechkina. "Learners’ harmonic preferences are modulated by lexical retrieval difficulty." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 5, no. 1 (March 23, 2020): 708. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v5i1.4758.
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Typological work has established the existence of language universals – features or combinations of features that (co-) occur in unrelated languages more frequently than expected by chance. The origins of language universals are a fundamental question in language sciences as these universals are considered a reflection of cognitive mechanisms underlying human language. In this study, we use a miniature artificial language learning paradigm to explore whether a well-known universal – a preference for harmonic word ordering between adpositional and verb phrases (i.e., placing the head in a consistent position with respect to the complements across the two phrase types) – originates in biases during language learning and whether this preference interacts with memory constraints (operationalized as lexical retrieval difficulty). We first trained participants on miniature languages containing adpositional phrases of a deterministic word order (either prepositional or postpositional inputs) and then briefly exposed them to simple transitive sentences (verb-subject-object and subject-object-verb order, equally frequent in the input). At test, we asked learners to describe simple transitive scenes. We found that in the hard lexical retrieval condition, learners exposed to a postpositional language showed a preference for harmonic ordering but learners of the prepositional language did not, which is only partially consistent to the typological distribution. In the easy lexical retrieval condition, learners of neither the postpositional nor prepositional language showed a preference for harmonic ordering, indicating that this preference is modulated by memory constraints.