Can Grammar Define Similarity of Human Natural Languages?
- 1 NUST, “MISIS”, Moscow, Russia
- 2 “Yandex”, LLC, Moscow, Russia
- 3 Institute of Linguistics of RAS, Moscow, Russia
Abstract
The aim of the present study is to show that similarity of human natural languages can be conveyed not only by phonetic data, but also by grammar. The paper regards the largest typological database WALS and its possibilities in the sphere of genealogic relationship of languages. Using the method of two-objective optimization and data mining, which is new for linguistic studies, we show that grammatical (structural) data, as well as phonetic data, can deliver information on the similarity of languages. Language isolates and micro-families do not have genealogic relatives based on phonetic information, but they do have genealogic relatives based on grammar information.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/ajassp.2016.1040.1052
Copyright: © 2016 Vladimir Nikolaevich Polyakov, Ivan Sergeevich Anisimov and Elena Andreevna Makarova. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Keywords
- WALS
- Two-Objective Optimization
- Data Mining
- Language Isolates
- Micro-Families
- Similarity
- Grammar