Using an open-access database to look at how languages express subjects and 'to be'
What is it about?
In this work, I used data from the database Grambank to look at how languages do two things. These are how languages express subjects and how a language expresses 'to be'. Doing these two things in certain ways is supposed to indicate that a language is a certain type called an omnipredicative language. Via statistics, I found that omnipredicative languages do not seem to be very common. I also had some issues along the way, so I made some suggestions for future research looking at omnipredicative languages.
Why is it important?
This paper tests a method that was created a few years ago, and finds that the method works as expected on different data. The method offers us a better way of double-checking what we think we know about how the languages of the world do different things.