The present study is an experimental investigation of the effects of syllable position, stress, focus and tempo on segmental durations in American English, British English, Greek and Swedish. Nonsense disyllabic CVCV words were produced in a carrier sentence under different conditions of stress, focus and tempo. The results indicate that stress and tempo have a major effect on both consonant and vowel across all four languages, whereas the effects of syllable position and focus are hardly evident. Significant interactions were mostly found between syllable position and stress for the vowel. 1.

The research of the last four decades suggests strongly that abstract laws of significant generality underlie much of the superficial complexity of human language. Evidence in favor of this conjecture comes from two different types of facts. First, there are cross-linguistic facts. Investigation

Revisiting the now de facto standard Stanford dependency representation, we propose an improved taxonomy to capture grammatical relations across languages, including morphologically rich ones. We suggest a two-layered taxonomy: a set of broadly attested universal grammatical relations, to which language-specific relations can be added. We emphasize the lexicalist stance of the Stanford Dependencies, which leads to a particular, partially new treatment of compounding, prepositions, and morphology. We show how existing dependency schemes for several languages map onto the universal taxonomy proposed here and close with consideration of practical implications of dependency representation choices for NLP applications, in particular parsing.

crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints while keeping interface conditions to an absolute minimum.

-terms from a cross-linguistic elicitation study and from a set of experiments focused on English. Taken together, the results suggest that humans attend to a complex set of interacting factors related to geometry, function, and qualitative physics when choosing spatial terms to describe relations

Little is known about depictive secondary predicates such as raw in She ate the fish raw in languages other than a few European ones. The goal of this paper is to broaden the database for this grammatical construction by reviewing its recurring formal properties, introducing a crosslinguistically

The encoding of interpretative dependencies in language is subject, inter alia, to complex syntactic constraints. This paper focuses on anaphors (reflexives and reciprocals), discussing some of the cross-linguistic patterns that have been identified by studies in the Generative linguistics

Abstract: This paper is in line with the principles of numerical taxonomy and with the program of holistic typology. It integrates the level of phonology with the morphological and syntactical level by correlating metric properties (such as n of phonemes per syllable and n of syllables per clause

The Hamblin-Karttunen approach has led to many insights about questions in English. In this article the results of this rule-by-rule tradition are reconsidered from a crosslinguistic perspective. Starting from the type-driven XLS theory developed in Bittner (1994a, b), it is argued that evidence

A recent work by Ramus and colleagues has renewed the interest in rhythm typology connected to the evaluation of speech production data. They proposed that differences in rhythm type could be accounted for by a segmental set of variables derived from the acoustic duration of consonants and vowels