BivalTyp

• glottocode is the language’s code provided by Glottolog.

• language is the name of the language. Note that in some cases there is no one-to-one correspondence between language names used in this project and their glottocodes. For example, Finnish and Ingrian Finnish are two different languages for the purposes of this project, but they share the same glottocode ‘finn1318’.

• macroarea identifies the macro-area (typically subcontinent size) where the language is spoken. The following partition of the world is used in this project: Australia; East and Southeast Asia; Europe; Mesoamerica; North Africa; North America; North and Central Asia; Papunesia; South America; South Asia; Sub-Saharan Africa; West Asia and the Caucasus.

• family (WALS) and genus (WALS) contain information on the genealogical affiliation of the language as provided in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Although imperfect in many respects, the system employed by WALS is convenient in that it provides a uniform two-level affiliation for each language, where “family” corresponds to a taxon with a time-depth comparable to that of the Indo-European languages, and “genus” to a taxon with a time-depth comparable to that of the major branches of the Indo-European family, such as Germanic or Celtic.

• number of nominal cases is the total number of different cases in the language’s nouns according to the description employed in the project.

• overall N is the total number of patterns that meet the acceptance criteria, see [How to read the data]how to read the data for more detail.

• transitives and intransitives are the total number of transitive and intransitive patterns respectively. Their sum always equals ‘overall N’.

• transitivity ratio and intransitivity ratio are coefficients calculated by dividing the number of transitive and intransitive patterns, respectively, by the ‘overall N’. The sum of these two ratios always equals 1.

• X-locus, Y-locus, and XY-locus are the number of patterns that display oblique encoding of the first argument (X), the second argument (Y), or both predefined arguments of the verb (X and Y) respectively. The sum of these three numbers always equals the total number of intransitives. See How to read the data for more detail on X-, Y- and XY-locus.

• number of classes is the total number of different valency patterns observed in the data.

• entropy (nat) measures the degree of diversity observed in the language’s valency class system. Shannon’s entropy (measured in nats) is calculated as follows: \[ \displaystyle H = - \sum^{n}_{i=1} \left( \dfrac{|C_i|}{|P|} \right) \log \left( \dfrac{|C_i|}{|P|} \right) \] where \(n\) is the number of different valency patterns observed in the data (‘number of classes’), \(C_i\) is the \(i\)-th valency class, \(P\) is the total number of patterns that meet the acceptance criteria (‘overall N’), and log corresponds to the natural logarithm. The theoretical minimum for \(H\) is 0 (it would be observed in a hypothetical language where all bivalent verbs belong to the same valency class). Higher entropy values correspond to greater levels of diversity.

• entopy of intransitives is the observed Shannon’s entropy calculated for intransitive patterns only. This measure estimates the degree of diversity in bivalent intransitive classes.