28.2117, Review: History of Linguistics: Borin, Saxena (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2117. Mon May 08 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2117, Review: History of Linguistics: Borin, Saxena (2016)

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Date: Mon, 08 May 2017 10:44:08
From: Natalie Operstein [natacha at ucla.edu]
Subject: Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-3410.html

EDITOR: Lars  Borin
EDITOR: Anju  Saxena
TITLE: Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Natalie Operstein,  

SUMMARY

“Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences”, edited by Lars Borin and
Anju Saxena, contains selected contributions to the Workshop on Comparing
Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences that was held at the University
of Gothenburg in October 2011. It consists of an introduction and nineteen
chapters arranged in two sections, ''Case Studies'' and ''Methods and Tools''.
In the following summary, the order of presentation of the individual chapters
differs from the order in which they appear in the volume. 

In the introductory chapter, ''The why and how of measuring linguistic
differences'', Lars Borin introduces the volume by surveying the field of
linguistic distance measurement and summarizing the individual volume
contributions. The focus of the survey is on the choice of features on which
computation of linguistic distances is based (e.g. lexical versus grammatical)
and on the methodology of distance calculation. 

Two of the chapters address the measuring of linguistic distance between the
source and target languages in the context of language learning. In
''Predicting language-learning difficulty'', Michael Cysouw explores ways of
quantifying the difficulty of a particular language from an English speaker's
point of view. The measured distances between English (as L1) and various
target L2s include geographical, genealogical, orthographic and structural
(the last one based on the data from WALS). Some of the results confirm
preexisting (presumably, empirical) data on the comparative difficulty of
foreign languages for English speakers, specifically the Foreign Service
Institute's language difficulty ranking
(http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty).
''The effect of linguistic distance across Indo-European mother tongues on
learning Dutch as a second language'', by Job Schepens et al., complements the
perspective of Cysouw's study by focusing on a single target L2 (Dutch) and
multiple source languages. The authors find that the difficulty of learning
Dutch as a second language is positively correlated with the linguistic
distance between Dutch and the learners' L1s.  

Two chapters address the use of vocabulary lists for computationally supported
classification of languages. In ''Carving Tibeto-Kanauri by its joints: using
basic vocabulary lists for genetic grouping of languages'', Anju Saxena and
Lars Borin use a revised, 157-item Swadesh list for investigating the internal
relationships of a subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Their study
also provides the context for an interesting general discussion pertaining to
the compiling and use of basic vocabulary lists for the genetic classification
of languages. In ''Using semantically restricted word-lists to investigate
relationships among Athapaskan languages'', Conor Snoek uses a list of 61 body
part and fluid terms to investigate relationships among 23 Athapaskan
languages and dialects. The distance between the languages is calculated based
on the orthographic forms of the relevant items in the word lists. Among the
interesting findings of the study is that of particular diachronic stability
of the terms for body fluids.  

Two chapters compare the results of internal classification of language
families obtained by manual and computational methods. In ''How aberrant are
divergent Indo-European subgroups?'', Folke Josephson discusses the findings
of Ringe et al. (2002) against the background of current discussion of
subgrouping relationships in the field of Indo-European linguistics. In
''Distance-based phylogenetic inference algorithms in the subgrouping of
Dravidian languages'', Taraka Rama and Sudheer Kolachina apply quantitative
methods to unresolved issues in the internal classification of Dravidian. As
part of their study, they create four datasets -- three lexical and one
structural -- for a large number of Dravidian languages. 

Two chapters quantitatively assess differences between varieties of the same
language. In ''Degrees of semantic control in measuring aggregated lexical
distances'', Kris Heylen and Tom Ruette study lexical variation in a corpus of
Dutch-language texts published between 1999 and 2004 and composed of four
subcorpora: Usenet posts, popular newspaper articles, quality newspaper
articles, and government announcements. The specific focus of their study is
on calculating the lexical distance between the subcorpora by using a set of
218 variables represented by 476 variants (e.g. the variable ''car'' is
represented by the variants 'auto' and 'wagen'). In ''Measuring socially
motivated pronunciation differences'', John Nerbonne et al. focus on
elucidating the place of regiolects (regional speech variants) in the Dutch
dialect-standard continuum. The authors use a modified version of the
Levenshtein distance (Levenshtein 1965) to measure pronunciation differences
between the base (local) dialects, standard languages (Belgian and
Netherlandic Dutch) and regiolects, as exemplified by the speech of eight
regional radio announcers employed by radio stations in the Netherlands and
Flanders. They find that of the eight regiolects examined, only one occupies
an intermediate position between the base dialects and the standard. Of the
remaining seven, five were found to be more different from the base dialects
than the standard, and two were more different from the standard than the base
dialects. These results lead the authors to conclude that the primary function
of regional speech is not so much to facilitate communication as to express
social identification with the region.  

Two chapters focus on comparing the performance of different computational
methodologies when applied to the same dataset. In ''Black box approaches to
genealogical classification and their shortcomings'', Jelena Prokić and Steven
Moran evaluate three fully automatized approaches to genetic language
classification. Their dataset consists of 366-item word lists in 69 indigenous
languages of Colombia, classified into 12 language families. The approaches in
question do not require any linguistic knowledge beyond the division of words
into segments, and are based on the Levenshtein distance (computed as the
smallest number of character insertions, deletions and substitutions required
to transform one word into the other in their pairwise comparison), the n-gram
analysis (which computes the similarity between two words as the number of
shared fixed-length strings divided by the length of the word), and the
zipping approach (which estimates the distance between texts in two languages
by merging the texts and measuring the compression rates). The authors find
that, although all the techniques were able to capture higher-level genetic
groupings (with the zipping approach being less accurate than the other two),
none of the methods is able to capture deeper genetic relationships or provide
other information useful to a historical linguist, such as probable cognates
or recurrent sound changes or sound correspondences. Another study aiming to
compare two methods of measuring linguistic distance -- cognate counting and
the Levenshtein distance -- unexpectedly produced unanticipated results. In
''Languages with longer words have more lexical change'', Søren Wichmann and
Eric W. Holman report their finding that the rate of lexical replacement is
positively correlated with the length of words, both within and across
languages. The authors' provisional proposed explanation appeals to
cross-linguistic differences in word-formation techniques.   

Several chapters attempt to quantify semantic distance. In ''Word similarity,
cognation, and translational equivalence'' Grzegorz Kondrak begins with the
observation that ''words that are phonetically similar across different
languages are more likely to be mutual translations'' (p.375). This
observation finds empirical support in two case studies involving similar
French-English word pairs, one based on a bilingual dictionary and the other
on a bitext. The author hypothesizes that the similarity of mutual
translations is explainable, in part, by their similar frequency in the
respective languages, which translates itself into similarity in word length. 

In ''Measuring morphosemantic language distance in parallel texts'', Bernhard
Wälchli and Ruprecht von Waldenfels base their approach on the assumption that
''forms with most similar distributions across parallel texts also have
similar meanings'' (p.475). E.g., they find that the English pronoun ‘he’
occurs in 2319 verses of the New Testament while the corresponding German
pronoun ‘er’ occurs in 2014 verses, and attribute this considerable
distributional overlap to ''the highly similar use of the two forms across the
two languages'' (p.476). The backbone of the approach is pairwise comparison
of parallel texts in a large number of languages; the case studies reported in
the paper involve a world-wide sample of 60 parallel texts from the Bible and
a more restricted sample of 27 translations of the novel ‘Master and
Margarita’ (plus the Russian original). The paper is rounded off with a
discussion of potential applications of the proposed language distance
measure, most notably to typological sampling. 

In ''Semantic typologies by means of network analysis of bilingual
dictionaries'', Ineta Sejane and Steffen Eger endeavor to give numeric
expression to lexical semantic distance between languages. Their method is
based on using bilingual dictionaries in multiple languages to generate
semantic network representations of a common reference language. The influence
of the reference language is held to be invariant, and the differences in the
segmentation of lexical semantic space are attributed to the languages used
for creating the networks. 

In ''Comparing linguistic systems of categorisation'', William B. McGregor
proposes and tests possible ways of measuring cross-linguistic distance with
respect to a grammatical construction. The construction in question, found in
some languages of northern Australia, is a type of complex predicate
consisting of a coverb (uninflecting verb) and an inflecting verb. After
introducing the construction and surveying how it has been approached in the
literature, McGregor considers three possible distance measures that abstract
away from the generic properties of the construction and center instead on its
less predictable, more individual lexical and semantic properties: the
relative size of the coverb sets that collocate with a particular inflecting
verb, the degree of similarity of the collocating coverb sets, and shared
versus language-specific coverb / inflecting verb collocations (pp.398-399). 

Several chapters focus on presenting or testing the possibilities of specific
research tools, resources or methodologies. In ''Towards automated language
classification: a clustering approach'', Armin Buch et al. apply the software
tool CLANS (CLuster ANalysis of Sequences) to several case studies to
illustrate the use of clustering approaches to genetic language
classification. One of the case studies involves 46 parallel translations of
the Bible in 37 languages and endeavors to measure the degree of syntactic
similarity between languages. The latter is quantified, e.g., via a version of
the Levenshtein distance which measures the extent of difference in the linear
order of mutual translations. 

In ''Information-theoretic modeling of etymological sound change'', Hannes
Wettig et al. propose a methodology for automated extraction of recurrent
sound correspondences from pre-compiled cognate sets. The methodology is
tested by using two digital Uralic etymological resources as the input. The
paper also provides a context for a general discussion of shortcomings and
possible biases inherent in the manual compilation of etymological datasets. 

In ''Contrasting linguistics and archaeology in the matrix model: GIS and
cluster analysis of the Arawakan languages'', Gerd Carling et al. outline an
interdisciplinary project utilizing GIS (Geographic Information System)
technology to collate spatially distributed linguistic and non-linguistic
data. The focus of the study is on relationships among the Arawak languages as
well as Arawak cultural patterns. The linguistic data consists of both lexical
and structural features, while the non-linguistic component includes data from
archaeology, ethnohistory, ethnography and physical geography.  

In ''Dependency-sensitive typological distance'', Harald Hammarström and
Loretta O'Connor aim to quantify typological distance between languages in a
way that incorporates dependency relationships among the features. They test
the proposed distance metrics on a database consisting of 81 binary features,
42 morphosyntactic and 39 phonological, in 35 Chibchan and neighboring
languages from the Isthmo-Colombian Area. 

In ''The Intercontinental Dictionary Series -- a rich and principled database
for language comparison'', Lars Borin et al. describe the origin and structure
of the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS), an electronic lexical
database freely available online at http://ids.clld.org/. The database is
composed of 1,310-item word lists, with 215 such lists available at the time
of the publication. The entries fall into three categories -- universal
concepts, cultural concepts and geographical / environmental phenomena -- and
are identified using English words for the respective word senses, with the
list of the word senses modeled after Buck (1949). The authors illustrate the
use of IDS lists for linguistic research by referencing a project that
investigates the Himalayan region as a possible linguistic area, partly with
the help of this tool
(https://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/research/digital-areal-linguistics). 

EVALUATION

The volume presents an interesting collection of articles endeavoring to give
numeric expression to the elusive notion of the amount of distance between
languages. The articles exemplify a number of linguistic subfields where such
an endeavor might be useful, ranging from the practical (language learning and
teaching) to the theoretical (typological sampling, genetic and typological
classification of languages, subgrouping of language families). Many
additional potential applications are pointed out in the individual
contributions (e.g. p.500). The volume's chapters discuss, explain and/or
compare a number of different methodologies, tools and resources and present
creative proposals on how to use different aspects of the language, including
phonology, syntax, semantics and the lexicon, to convert the observed
cross-linguistic and/or intra-linguistic differences into tangible distance
metrics. 

A useful feature of several of the chapters are abundant references to past
and current literature on the techniques of measuring linguistic distances.
Engagement with concrete data also provides the framework for addressing
larger conceptual and methodological issues in linguistics. These include, but
are not limited to, the causes of language change, genetic stability of
typological features, grouping of languages by their segmentation of semantic
space, potential biases in the construction of etymological datasets, variable
understanding of the notion of 'basic vocabulary' in different subfields of
linguistics, improvement of lexically-based dating techniques, methodological
problems in the compilation and use of vocabulary lists, and how fully
automatized analyses of data compare with manual analyses of the same data as
performed by experts. The overall effect of this discussion is to contribute
to the distillation of techniques and data types potentially amenable for use
as linguistic distance markers. 

The volume's focus on linguistic differences also contributes to the growing
body of literature on linguistic complexity (e.g. Miestamo et al. 2008;
Sampson et al. 2009), while at the same time serving as a timely reminder
about how different the world's languages really are. To quote Wälchli and von
Waldenfels, ''[l]anguages are more different from one another than the average
linguist believes'' (p.492). The volume presents a variety of numerical
approaches to measuring different aspects of these differences for various
purposes ranging from language learning to linguistic typology and to language
classification. 
 
REFERENCES

Buck, Carl Darling. 1949. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal
Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History of Ideas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Levenshtein, Vladimir. 1965. Dvoichnye kody s ispravleniem vypadenij, vstavok
i zameshchenij simvolov [Binary codes with correction of deletions, insertions
and symbol replacements]. Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 163: 845-848. 

Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemäki and Fred Karlsson (eds). 2008. Language
Complexity: Typology, Contact, Change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow and Ann Taylor. 2002. Indo-European and computational
cladistics. Transactions of the Philological Society 100: 59-129.

Sampson, Geoffrey, David Gil and Peter Trudgill (eds). 2009. Language
Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Natalie Operstein is the author of ''Consonant Structure and Prevocalization''
(2010) and ''Zaniza Zapotec'' (2015) and co-editor of ''Valence Changes in
Zapotec: Synchrony, Diachrony, Typology'' (2015). Her research interests
include historical and comparative linguistics, phonology and language
contact.





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