James W. Minett

List of John Benjamins publications for which James W. Minett plays a role.

Articles

Gong, Tao, James W. Minett and William S-Y. Wang 2009 A simulation study on word order biasInteraction Studies 10:1, pp. 51–75 | Article
The majority of the extant languages have one of three dominant basic word orders: SVO, SOV or VSO. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this word order bias, including the existence of a universal grammar, the learnability imposed by cognitive constraints, the descent of modern… read more
Minett, James W. and William S-Y. Wang 2003 On detecting borrowing: Distance-based and character-based approachesDiachronica 20:2, pp. 289–330 | Article
Two computational methods for detecting borrowing among a family of genetically related languages are proposed. One method, based on the detection of branches with negative length in lexicostatistical trees, is shown to work poorly. As we demonstrate, this method is similar to another recently… read more