CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Seminar with Michael Cysouw on Monday June 1, 2015.
Title: Language comparison through massively parallel texts
Abstract
A central goal of general linguistics is to try and make statements about human language in general, and not just for a few, widely studied languages. There currently exists a range of different methodologies to investigate and compare many disparate languages. However, the central problem of comparability always raises its ugly head: how do we make sure that we are comparing like with like across languages? As a solution to the problem of comparability, I propose to use massively parallel texts, i.e. the same text translated into many different languages (cf. http://paralleltext.info). I will present a few basic examples of how parallel texts can be used for language comparison and discuss possible future directions of this kind research.