Saturday, April 24, 2010

Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages

A new free online resource for linguists: Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages.  I haven't had time to play around with it, but the list of contributors is impressive.Money quote:

SSWL is a searchable database that allows users to discover which properties (morphological, syntactic, and semantic) characterize a language, as well as how these properties relate across languages. This system is designed to be free to the public and open-ended. Anyone can use the database to perform queries.

Emphasis added (yes, that's for you LDC, haha).

(HT WordAficionada via Twitter #linguistics)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chris,
If this is what you are after why not agitate for Matthew Dryer to open up his db to the web?

Chris said...

Haha, I've seen Mathew's "database". It's a 5K page word document on a 1987 Macintosh SE, hehe. Okay, I tease, it's not that bad.

But in fairness, he has participated significantly in The World Atlas of Language Structures.

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...