http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68558 Sat, 03 Oct 2026 05:20:08 GMT 2026-10-03T05:20:08Z https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de:443/xmlui/bitstream/id/9840cfbe-8050-4fe4-b135-f1e14bf0a60b/ http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68558 http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68702 River thinking: Arawakan and Pano-Tacanan in the Upper Amazon Transition Area Muysken, Pieter; van Gijn, Rik This paper studies whether being present in communities belonging to a particular river system influences the structural make up of languages spoken on the Upper Amazon (UA), combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The UA has many rivers that spring in the Andes and further east join the Amazon. We have coded 76 languages for 23 features (phonology, syntax). Both phylogeny and river system can be taken into account, and phylogeny is overall a better predictor for the characters studied. However, a number of innovations within specific phylogenies in Arawakan and Pano-Tacanan can be accounted for as influence of the river system where a language is spoken. Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68702 2016-03-07T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68642 An approach to cross-concept cognacy identification Wahle, Johannes It is a well known phenomenon in historical linguistics, that the meaning of a proto form is different to the meaning of its descendants. This phenomenon of meaning change is often ignored in studies which use tools from statistical phylogenetic analysis to determine language relationships. It has been shown, that the databases currently used in linguistic phylogeny exhibit a considerable amount of the described phenomenon. The current study proposes a method to detect such instances of cross-concept relationships of words. Although the evaluation can not be done by standard means, the results indicate that semantic similarity is a good indicator for cross-concept relationships and that tools from computational biology offer a good framework for this kind of approach. Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68642 2016-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68640 Using computational criteria to extract large Swadesh lists for lexicostatistics Dellert, Johannes; Buch, Armin We propose a new method for empirically determining lists of basic concepts for the purpose of compiling extensive lexicostatistical databases. The idea is to approximate a notion of “swadeshness” formally and reproducibly without expert knowledge or bias, and being able to rank any number of concepts given enough data. Unlike previous approaches, our procedure indirectly measures both stability of concepts against lexical replacement, and their proneness to phenomena such as onomatopoesia and extensive borrowing. The method provides a fully automated way to generate customized Swadesh lists of any desired length, possibly adapted to a given geographical region. We apply the method to a large lexical database of Northern Eurasia, deriving a swadeshness ranking for more than 5,000 concepts expressed by German lemmas. We evaluate this ranking against existing shorter lists of basic concepts to validate the method, and give an English version of the 300 top concepts according to this ranking. Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68640 2016-03-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68639 Zipf's law of abbreviation as a language universal Bentz, Christian; Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon Words that are used more frequently tend to be shorter. This statement is known as Zipf’s law of abbreviation. Here we perform the widest investigation of the presence of the law to date. In a sample of 1262 texts and 986 different languages - about 13% of the world’s language diversity - a negative correlation between word frequency and word length is found in all cases. In line with Zipf’s original proposal, we argue that this universal trend is likely to derive from fundamental principles of information processing and transfer. Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10900/68639 2016-03-02T00:00:00Z