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Re: Head-marking languages and adpositions?

From:Boudewijn Rempt <boud@...>
Date:Friday, September 20, 2002, 14:40
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On Friday 20 September 2002 16:22, you wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 12:44:24AM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote: > > Many of these questions are addressed in Johana Nichols' book > > _Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time_: > > > > It's not for the beginner, but it addresses all sorts of statistical > > correlations in re head-markedness. > > Looks interesting, but is expensive and Amazon doesn't have any customer > reviews on it. How is it organized? Is it all just statistics or does > it have usage examples, too? (I'm mostly interested in understanding > what such languages *feel* like... though I guess if I understood the rules > I could construct my own examples. But examples are key.) >
I've got it here -- it's one of the few books that combine statistics and linguistics that got a grudging 'not too silly, not too many stupid mistakes' from a friend of Irina and mine -- who writes statistical software for genetic research (if I understand correctly what she does). For me -- as a complete layman as regards statistics, her works looks very plausible. But I can't even build a Bayesian probability function and get it to work correctly. However, if you're looking for what those languages 'feel' like, it may not be the right book. There aren't many examples -- chapter 2 and 4 mainly. The TOC is: introduction, favored and disfavored grammatical patters, correlations between types, correleations of structural types with grammatical categories, diachronic stability: genetic and areal, role of geography: structural affinities between areas, linguistic diversity: geographical distriubtion, diversity and linguistic prehistory: conclusions. - -- Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9izDqdaCcgCmN5d8RAp0RAJ43HBQ2xAI0Qsz2fMLYwzIZam7pNwCeJ1Jx CMgDpLN7UudiBcZC1ZHKs5A= =viZM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----