4 papers
Word length predicts word order: "Min-max"-ing drives language evolution
Hiram Ring
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative place…
The taggedPBC: Annotating a massive parallel corpus for crosslinguistic investigations
Hiram Ring
Existing datasets available for crosslinguistic investigations have tended to focus on large amounts of data for a small group of languages or a small amount of data for a large nu…
Are most sentences unique? An empirical examination of Chomskyan claims
Hiram Ring
A repeated claim in linguistics is that the majority of linguistic utterances are unique. For example, Pinker (1994: 10), summarizing an argument by Noam Chomsky, states that "virt…
Extending dependencies to the taggedPBC: Word order in transitive clauses
Hiram Ring
The taggedPBC (Ring 2025a) contains more than 1,800 sentences of pos-tagged parallel text data from over 1,500 languages, representing 133 language families and 111 isolates. While…