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Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

While global patterns of human genetic diversityare increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available.

Syntactic Pausing?

In this study, we look at the distribution of silent pauses within existing multi-language corpora to see whether their location and length correlate with any higher-level syntactic groupings in the given languages, and what this can tell us about motivations for pausing phenomena.

Kera’a (Arunachal Pradesh, India)

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The asymmetrical categories of negation in Bumthang

Less inflectional categories are found in negated clauses than are found in affirmative clauses in Bumthang, a Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan.