We evaluate corpus-based measures of linguistic complexity obtained using Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks. We propose a method of estimating robustness of the complexity values obtained using a given measure and a given treebank. The results indicate that measures of syntactic complexity might be on average less robust than those of morphological complexity. We also estimate the validity of complexity measures by comparing the results for very similar languages and checking for unexpected differences. We show that some of those differences that arise can be diminished by using parallel treebanks and, more importantly from the practical point of view, by harmonizing the languagespecific solutions in the UD annotation.

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Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with (a) ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or (b) accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or (c) predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves all the observed problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality.

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