Video Recordings

Language structures are incredibly diverse. But for practical purposes, we have to carve up this continuum of language phenomena. Two practical purposes are teaching typological syntax to undergraduates and the Universal Dependencies project, which are similar in their goals. In this talk I will describe principles to motivate a set of universal dependencies, but mainly focus on specific typological universals that can help in developing guidelines to apply UD to specific language constructions. In some cases, uniform guidelines are typologically well-motivated, but in other cases, it might be worth revisiting the inventory of UD dependencies. This talk focuses on the particularly vexing problems with modification constructions, including different types of modifiers, modification vs. compounds, and numeral classifiers and so-called pseudo-partitive constructions.