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.
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.
In this talk, I address how the "one intonation unit" constraint interacts with the formal realisation of serial verb constructions and clause-chaining, as well as processes of grammaticalisation. The effects of discourse, verbal meaning, and weakening of prosodic boundaries are discussed.
In this talk, we will discuss associations between syntactic units and silent pauses in a sample of diverse languages. The relation between pausing and syntactic boundaries has been rarely tested outside of major world languages, with the majority of studies performed in lab conditions utilising reading tasks and/or controlled stimuli. This work represents a first step in the wider testing of the purported correlation of pause length and syntactic unithood using naturalistic data.
In this talk, I explore a multivariate approach to visualising the distribution of complex verbal constructions in Kera’a (Idu), a Trans-Himalayan language spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, India.
In this presentation, we compare intonational boundary cues in three understudied languages which have three distinct typological profiles - Kera'a (Tibeto-Burman, NE India), Waima'a (Austronesian, Timor-Leste), and Warlpiri.
This talk discusses and accounts for instances in which the comparative is instead less marked than the positive, focusing on Bumthang, a Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan.
With a lack of valency-decreasing devices, and the grammaticalisation of ‘give’ for both causative and applicative functions, Bumthang stands out as a language with a verbal typology unusual for its region.
The unusual order of constituents in the Bumthang noun phrase helps us map the pre-history of the Himalaya.