Computational quantitative syntax
The case of Universal 18
Accounting for the constraints on the possible word orders of a sentence in a language and across the world languages is a core challenge for syntactic theory. In the spirit of computational quantitative syntax, in this paper we present quantitative evidence about Universal 18. We show that corpus data confirms a dispreference for the word order combination where adjectives precede but numerals follow the nouns (Adj-N and N-Num). We then investigate if this dispreference is better explained as a constraint expressed at the level of the dominant orders or at the level of individual structures. Corpus counts support the latter interpretation. Finally, we propose a formal model of how this bias against Adj-N-Num orders can be integrated in the grammar.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Typological data on Universal 18
- 3.Accounts of language universals and Universal 18
- 3.1Structure-level accounts
- 3.2Grammar-level accounts
- 4.Our approach to Universal 18
- 4.1Cross-linguistic corpus data
- Corpus data for Latin and Ancient Greek
- Preprocessing and collection of counts
- Collected counts
- 4.2Results and discussion
- 5.Towards a model explaining Universal 18
- 5.1Comparison of models 1 and 2
- 6.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
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