Defining and Counting Phonological Classes in Cross-linguistic Segment Databases

Dan Dediu, Scott Moisik


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
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1955–1962
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1310
DOI:
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1310.pdf