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In:The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations
Edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig
[Studies in Language Companion Series 240] 2026
► pp. 376–396

Chapter 15
Pauses, parts of speech, and word order

A comparative corpus study on 27 languages

ORCiD logo with link | CNRS-SeDyL | Humboldt University of Berlin
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Abstract
This study investigates how pauses before nouns and verbs interact with word order and prosodic structure across a worldwide sample of 27 languages from the DoReCo corpus. Whereas prior research has suggested that more pauses occur before nouns in general, the results here show that this asymmetry holds consistently only in verb-final languages, while in other languages, pausing patterns are mixed. Since word order mediates pausing asymmetries, it likely also plays a major role in explaining prefixing asymmetries — namely, the global dispreference for prefixes on nouns compared to verbs. The study demonstrates the potential of comparative corpus linguistics for examining typological patterns in speech, especially when incorporating prosodic annotation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and annotation
  • 3.Raw distribution of pauses before nouns and verbs
  • 4.Statistical analyses
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Data availability
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
References (59)
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