Abstract
Recently, there has been an explosion in the availability of large, good-quality cross-linguistic databases such as WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013), Glottolog (Hammarstrom et al., 2015) and Phoible (Moran & McCloy, 2014). Databases such as Phoible contain the actual segments used by various languages as they are given in the primary language descriptions. However, this segment-level representation cannot be used directly for analyses that require generalizations over classes of segments that share theoretically interesting features. Here we present a method and the associated R (R Core Team, 2014) code that allows the flexible definition of such meaningful classes and that can identify the sets of segments falling into such a class for any language inventory. The method and its results are important for those interested in exploring cross-linguistic patterns of phonetic and phonological diversity and their relationship to extra-linguistic factors and processes such as climate, economics, history or human genetics.- Anthology ID:
- L16-1310
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2016
- Address:
- Portorož, Slovenia
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1955–1962
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/L16-1310
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Dan Dediu and Scott Moisik. 2016. Defining and Counting Phonological Classes in Cross-linguistic Segment Databases. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1955–1962, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Defining and Counting Phonological Classes in Cross-linguistic Segment Databases (Dediu & Moisik, LREC 2016)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/L16-1310.pdf