Marc Allassonnière-Tang

My academic background is in general linguistics, including topics such as syntax and phonology. I worked in the computer industry (ASUS) before coming back to academia. Since then, I have been developing skills in quantitative and computational typology to investigate and refine linguistic hypotheses, both synchronically and diachronically.

My current research relates to (and is not restricted to) nominal classification systems, such as the masculine/feminine distinction in French or the shape-based classifiers in Mandarin. The main aim is to explain the worldwide diversity and distribution of such systems, which are found in around half of the languages of the world. This involves analyzing ‘what is their definition’, ‘why they are found in some languages and not others’, ‘what is their function’, ‘how are their categories constructed’, and ‘how do they interact with the sociocultural and the cognitive systems’.

Research interests and methods include (but are not limited to): linguistic typology, computational linguistics, classification and regression, Bayesian phylogenetic inference, and agent-based simulation modeling.

I hold a habilitation (HDR) and can supervise PhD theses. Feel free to get in touch if you are interested in working on these topics.

If you want to find out more about what I do in a more playful way, you can try these two games (in French): Evo-Game and Perdui dans l’espace. You can also browse the gallery for videos and pictures.

selected publications

Evolutionary pathways of complexity in gender systems

Olena Shcherbakova, and Marc Allassonnière-Tang

Journal of Language Evolution 2024

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Humans categorize the experience they encounter in various ways, which is mirrored, for instance, in grammatical gender systems of languages. In such systems, nouns are grouped based on whether they refer to masculine/feminine beings, (non-)humans, (in)animate entities, or objects with specific shapes. Languages differ greatly in how many gender assignment rules are incorporated in gender systems and how many word classes carry gender marking (gender agreement patterns). It has been suggested that these two dimensions are positively associated as numerous assignment rules are better sustained by numerous agreement patterns. We test this claim by analyzing the correlated evolution (Continuous method in BayesTraits) and making the causal inferences about the relationships (phylogenetic path analysis) between these 2 dimensions in 482 languages from the global Grambank database. By applying these methods to linguistic data matched to phylogenetic trees (a world tree and individual families), we evaluate whether various types of gender assignment rules (semantic, phonological, and unpredictable) are causally linked to more gender agreement patterns on the global level and in individual language families. Our results on the world language tree suggest that semantic rules are weakly positively correlated with gender agreement and that the development of agreement patterns is facilitated by different rules in individual families. For example, in Indo-European languages, more agreement patterns are caused by the presence of phonological and unpredictable rules, while in Bantu languages, the driving force of agreement patterns is the variety of semantic rules. Our study shows that the relationships between agreement and rules are family-specific and yields support to the idea that more distinct rules and/or rule types might be more robust in languages with more pervasive gender agreement.
@article{gender_complexity_2024, author = {Shcherbakova, Olena and Allassonnière-Tang, Marc}, title = {{Evolutionary pathways of complexity in gender systems}}, journal = {Journal of Language Evolution}, volume = {8}, number = {2}, pages = {120-133}, year = {2024}, month = mar, issn = {2058-458X}, doi = {10.1093/jole/lzae001}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzae001}, }
Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world

One-Soon Her, Harald Hammarström, and Marc Allassonnière-Tang

Linguistics Vanguard 2022

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This paper presents a precise definition of numeral classifiers, steps to identify a numeral classifier language, and a database of 3,338 languages, of which 723 languages have been identified as having a numeral classifier system. The database, named World Atlas of Classifier Languages (WACL), has been systematically constructed over the last 10 years via a manual survey of relevant literature and also an automatic scan of digitized grammars followed by manual checking. The open-access release of WACL is thus a significant contribution to linguistic research in providing (i) a precise definition and examples of how to identify numeral classifiers in language data and (ii) the largest dataset of numeral classifier languages in the world. As such it offers researchers a rich and stable data source for conducting typological, quantitative, and phylogenetic analyses on numeral classifiers. The database will also be expanded with additional features relating to numeral classifiers in the future in order to allow more fine-grained analyses.
@article{her_defining_2022, title = {Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world}, issn = {2199-174X}, doi = {10.1515/lingvan-2022-0006}, language = {en}, urldate = {2022-12-25}, journal = {Linguistics Vanguard}, volume = {8}, number = {1}, pages = {151--164}, author = {Her, One-Soon and Hammarström, Harald and Allassonnière-Tang, Marc}, month = nov, year = {2022}, }
Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems

Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Olof Lundgren, Maja Robbers, and 5 more authors

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 2021

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Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal diffusibility, which is typically ascribed to language contact. In such a scenario, speakers of two or more languages interact and influence each other’s languages, and in this interaction, more grammaticalized features tend to be more resistant to diffusion compared to features of more lexical content. An alternative explanation is vertical heritability: languages in proximity often share genealogical descent. Here, we suggest that the geographic distribution of features globally can be explained by two major pathways, which are generally not distinguished within quantitative typological models: feature diffusion and language expansion. The first pathway corresponds to the contact scenario described above, while the second occurs when speakers of genetically related languages migrate. We take the worldwide distribution of nominal classification systems (grammatical gender, noun class, and classifier) as a case study to show that more grammaticalized systems, such as gender, and less grammaticalized systems, such as classifiers, are almost equally widespread, but the former spread more by language expansion historically, whereas the latter spread more by feature diffusion. Our results indicate that quantitative models measuring the areal diffusibility and stability of linguistic features are likely to be affected by language expansion that occurs by historical coincidence. We anticipate that our findings will support studies of language diversity in a more sophisticated way, with relevance to other parts of language, such as phonology.
@article{allassonniere-tang_expansion_2021, title = {Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems}, volume = {8}, issn = {2662-9992}, doi = {10.1057/s41599-021-01003-5}, language = {en}, number = {1}, urldate = {2022-12-25}, journal = {Humanities and Social Sciences Communications}, author = {Allassonnière-Tang, Marc and Lundgren, Olof and Robbers, Maja and Cronhamn, Sandra and Larsson, Filip and Her, One-Soon and Hammarström, Harald and Carling, Gerd}, month = dec, year = {2021}, pages = {331}, }
A typology of classifiers and gender: From description to computation

Marc Tang

In Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 2019

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Categorization is one the most relevant tasks realized by humans during their life, as we consistently need to categorize the things and experience that we encounter. Such need is reflected in language via various mechanisms, the most prominent being nominal classification systems (e.g., grammatical gender such as the masculine/feminine distinction in French). Typological methods are used to investigate the underlying functions and structures of such systems, using a wide variety of cross-linguistic data to examine universality and variability. This analysis is itself a classification task, as languages are categorized and clustered according to their grammatical features. This thesis provides a cross-linguistic typological analysis of nominal classification systems and in parallel compares a number of quantitative methods that can be applied at different scales. First, this thesis provides an analysis of nominal classification systems (i.e., gender and classifiers) via the description of three languages with respectively gender, classifiers, and both. While the analysis of the first two languages are more of a descriptive nature and aligns with findings in the existing literature, the third language provides novel insights to the typology of nominal classification systems by demonstrating how classifiers and gender may co-occur in one language in terms of distribution of functions. Second, the underlying logic of nominal classification systems is commonly considered difficult to investigate, e.g., is there a consistent logic behind gender assignment in language? is it possible to explain the distribution of classifier languages of the world while taking into account geographical and genealogical effects? This thesis addresses the lack of arbitrariness of nominal classification systems at three different scales: The distribution of classifiers at the worldwide level, the presence of gender within a language family, and gender assignment at the language-internal level. The methods of random forests, phylogenetics, and word embeddings with neural networks are selected since they are respectively applicable at three different scales of research questions (worldwide, family-internal, language-internal).
@book{tang_typology_2019, address = {Uppsala}, series = {Studia {Linguistica} {Upsaliensia}}, title = {A typology of classifiers and gender: {From} description to computation}, copyright = {All rights reserved}, isbn = {978-91-513-0507-3}, number = {23}, publisher = {Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis}, author = {Tang, Marc}, year = {2019}, keywords = {Språkvetenskap, Genus (språkvetenskap), Neuronnät (datorer)}, }