Uri Tadmor

Tadmor, Uri 2015 Chapter 4. When culture grammaticalizes: The pronominal system of Onya Darat Language Structure and Environment: Social, cultural, and natural factors, De Busser, Rik and Randy J. LaPolla (eds.), pp. 77–98 | Article

The Onya Darat language of Borneo has a large set of personal pronouns. In addition to encoding the categories of person and number, these pronouns also encode the generational affiliation of their referents. It is suggested that obligatory expression of kinship in the pronoun system arose due to… read more

Tadmor, Uri, Martin Haspelmath and Bradley Taylor 2012 Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh, Wichmann, Søren and Anthony P. Grant (eds.), pp. 35–55 | Article

This paper reports on a collaborative quantitative study of loanwords in 41 languages, aimed at identifying meanings and groups of meanings that are borrowing-resistant. We find that nouns are more borrowable than adjectives or verbs, that content words are more borrowable than function words, and… read more

Tadmor, Uri, Martin Haspelmath and Bradley Taylor 2010 Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh, Wichmann, Søren and Anthony P. Grant (eds.), pp. 226–246 | Article

This paper reports on a collaborative quantitative study of loanwords in 41 languages, aimed at identifying meanings and groups of meanings that are borrowing-resistant. We find that nouns are more borrowable than adjectives or verbs, that content words are more borrowable than function words, and… read more

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