linguistics-analysis

name: linguistics-analysis description: Analyze language structures, typological features, and semantic change across languages

Linguistics Analysis

Purpose

Analyze language structures, cross-linguistic patterns, and diachronic semantic change.

Key Datasets

• WALS (wals.info): 192 linguistic features across 2,679 languages — phonology, morphology, syntax, word order
• HistWords (nlp.stanford.edu/projects/histwords): Diachronic word embeddings for English, French, German, Chinese
• Universal Dependencies: 200+ treebanks, 100+ languages, dependency annotation

Analysis Types

• Typological analysis: Feature distributions, language universals, areal patterns
• Diachronic analysis: Semantic drift, grammaticalization, lexical change
• Syntactic analysis: Constituency/dependency parsing, word order patterns
• Phonological analysis: Sound inventories, phonotactics, prosody
• Corpus analysis: Frequency distributions, collocations, concordances

Protocol

1. Language identification — Identify language family, branch, typological profile
2. Feature analysis — Map relevant WALS features for target language(s)
3. Comparative analysis — Cross-linguistic comparison using typological databases
4. Statistical testing — Test for significant patterns (chi-square, Fisher's exact)
5. Visualization — Geographic and phylogenetic visualizations of features

Rules

• Use ISO 639-3 language codes for unambiguous identification
• Cite primary grammars and fieldwork sources
• Distinguish descriptive from prescriptive claims
• Handle endangered language data with cultural sensitivity