Online Labour Index 2020: new ways to measure the world’s remote freelancing market

The Online Labour Index (OLI) was launched in 2016 to measure the global utilisation of online freelance work at scale. Five years after its creation, the OLI has become a point of reference for scholars and policy experts investigating the online gig economy. As the market for online freelancing work matures, a high volume of data and new analytical tools allow us to revisit half a decade of online freelance monitoring and extend the index's scope to more dimensions of the global online freelancing market. While (still) measuring the utilisation of online labour across countries and occupations by tracking the number of projects and tasks posted on major English-language platforms, the new Online Labour Index 2020 (OLI 2020) also tracks Spanish- and Russian-language platforms, reveals changes over time in the geography of labour supply and estimates female participation in the online gig economy. The rising popularity of software and tech work and the concentration of freelancers on the Indian subcontinent are examples of the insights that the OLI 2020 provides. The OLI 2020 delivers a more detailed picture of the world of online freelancing via an interactive online visualisation updated daily. It provides easy access to downloadable open data for policymakers, labour market researchers, and the general public (www.onlinelabourobservatory.org)

Diminutives as pioneers of derivational and inflectional development – a cross-linguistic perspective

Although diminutives are commonly viewed as being typical of child speech and childdirected speech, their acquisition has so far neither been studied in a cross-linguistic perspective nor been related to recent theoretical developments in the study of diminutives and of the associated evaluative classes of augmentatives and pejoratives (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi, 1994, 2001; Jurafsky, 1996). However, the cross-linguistic study of the development of diminutives is apt to shed light on much debated theoretical issues in the acquisition of morphology and on the impact of language typology on acquisition. We expect productivity, morphological transparency and salience in the input language to favour diminutive acquisition, which, in turn, may even facilitate the development of inflectional morphology. Our paper is meant to address these issues based on extensive longitudinal child data from typologically different languages. The data are transcribed and morphologically coded according to CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) within the “Cross-linguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition”. The main languages to be considered in this paper are the Indo-European inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Croatian, Greek and German, as well as the agglutinating languages Turkish and HungarianVytauto Didžiojo universiteta