Mapping 'when'-clauses in Latin American and Caribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Pedrazzini, Nilo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Pedrazzini, Nilo
author_facet Pedrazzini, Nilo
contents Languages can encode temporal subordination lexically, via subordinating conjunctions, and morphologically, by marking the relation on the predicate. Systematic cross-linguistic variation among the former can be studied using well-established token-based typological approaches to token-aligned parallel corpora. Variation among different morphological means is instead much harder to tackle and therefore more poorly understood, despite being predominant in several language groups. This paper explores variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination ('when'-clauses) among the languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, where morphological marking is particularly common. It presents probabilistic semantic maps computed on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively use lexified connectors, incorporating associations between character $n$-grams and English $when$. The approach allows capturing morphological clause-linkage devices in addition to lexified connectors, paving the way for larger-scale, strategy-agnostic analyses of typological variation in temporal subordination.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_18257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping 'when'-clauses in Latin American and Caribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology
Pedrazzini, Nilo
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
68T50, 68U15, 68T35, (Primary), 86A32, 15A03 (Secondary)
I.2.7
Languages can encode temporal subordination lexically, via subordinating conjunctions, and morphologically, by marking the relation on the predicate. Systematic cross-linguistic variation among the former can be studied using well-established token-based typological approaches to token-aligned parallel corpora. Variation among different morphological means is instead much harder to tackle and therefore more poorly understood, despite being predominant in several language groups. This paper explores variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination ('when'-clauses) among the languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, where morphological marking is particularly common. It presents probabilistic semantic maps computed on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively use lexified connectors, incorporating associations between character $n$-grams and English $when$. The approach allows capturing morphological clause-linkage devices in addition to lexified connectors, paving the way for larger-scale, strategy-agnostic analyses of typological variation in temporal subordination.
title Mapping 'when'-clauses in Latin American and Caribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
68T50, 68U15, 68T35, (Primary), 86A32, 15A03 (Secondary)
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18257