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Book: Machine-Aided Linguistic Discovery

Chapter: Inferring Plausible Laws/Patterns II: UNIVAUTO and Implicational Phonological Universals

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.25584

Blurb:

In this chapter is described the computational exploration of the UPSID database, comprising the segment inventories of 451 languages, for implicational universals of type A → B (“If Segment A, then Segment B”). UNIVAUTO found and verbalized 146 statistically significant (near) universals that are supported by languages from at least two language families from at least two geographical areas. Some implications of these findings are discussed.

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