[sswllinguistics:64] SSWL Newsletter March 2010

[Chris]

Dear All,

Lots of exciting developments. Three powerful new features have been
added. A big thanks to Dennis and Jillian for their hard work in
getting
these features implemented.

First, under Advanced Options, you are now able to constrain the
"antecedent" or
"consequent" of the Universal Implications selection. Here is an
example:

Select Universal Implications
Select Antecedent
Select Adjective Noun

This will give you all the property-value pairs that hold whenever
Adjective Noun:Yes holds. It also gives you all the property-value
pairs that
hold whenever Adjective Noun:No holds. So this is a super convenient
way of searching out Greenbergian implicational universals.

Of course, if you want to find all implicational universals, just
run the search with no constraints (no property or language
constraints).
But that takes a bit of time, and there are lots and lots of results.
So being able to constrain the antecedent and/or the consequent is
useful.

Play with it, and you will see it is a lot of fun.

Second, it is now possible under Advanced Options to create a
similarity tree for a set of languages. For example,

Select Create Similarity Tree
Select
Adjective Noun
Noun Adjective
Numeral Noun
Noun Numeral
Demonstrative Noun
Noun Demonstrative

Then at the output, press View Similarity Tree. This
will show you a grouping of all the languages according
to the properties you selected (you can also specify
a subset of the languages).

This feature will help give a bird's eye view of the clusters
of languages that exist with regards to a particular set of
properties, and to tell you how closely your favorite
language is related to others.

I am very interested in hearing what applications of
this feature people come up with. I will post the exact algorithm
in the Help file (or the About section) shortly.

Third, we have installed a forum system. This means
that all property-value settings can be commented on.
This will allow contributors to help each other catch
typos and inconsistencies. It will also allow people to
register disagreements on data and to give feedback.
One needs to login to use this feature.

As always, any and all feedback is appreciated.
Please ask other language experts to register. We
are always looking for new languages.

Chris

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