Generalizing Language Comparison.

The article comments on "Inferring universals from grammatical variation: Multidimensional scaling for typological analysis," by William Croft and Keith T. Poole. The focus is on: the limitations of the method used by Croft and Poole to generalize semantic mapping for use in linguistic typology; lan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Theoretical Linguistics Vol. 34; no. 1; pp. 47 - 52
Main Author:	Cysouw, Michael
Format:	Editorial
Published:	De Gruyter Jan2008
Subjects:	Croft, William Poole, Keith T. Research methodology
Online Access:	View this record in EBSCOhost

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Summary:	The article comments on "Inferring universals from grammatical variation: Multidimensional scaling for typological analysis," by William Croft and Keith T. Poole. The focus is on: the limitations of the method used by Croft and Poole to generalize semantic mapping for use in linguistic typology; language comparison via the Optimal Classification Nonparametric Unfolding algorithm; and the recognition of pairwise similarities in sets of languages or comparative concepts.