Word Order Typology Interacts With Linguistic Complexity: A Cross‐Linguistic Corpus Study

Abstract

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer-i Cancho, 2008Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross-linguistically show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb-final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) or Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results Correspondence should be sent to Himanshu Yadav is now affiliated with University of Potsdam, Germany. Vishakha Shukla is now affiliated with Shroff Charity Eye Hospital, Delhi, India. show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for "limited adaptability" to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation.

What Determines the Order of Verbal Dependents in Hindi? Effects of Efficiency in Comprehension and Production

“…The results show that comprehension/production efficiency based factors affect dependency distance and ordering of preverbal dependents in Hindi. Previous work investigating dependency distance has demonstrated that SOV languages allow for longer dependency distance between the verb and its prior dependents (Futrell et al, 2020c;Yadav et al, 2020;Konieczny, 2000). The current work makes an important contribution by highlighting that compared to preverbal adjuncts, the core arguments (subject, indirect object and direct object) tend to be closer to the verb in an SOV language like Hindi.…”

“…Morphological marking A feature of a majority of head-final languages is the presence of case marking on nouns that signifies the syntactic relation between a nouns and its verbal head. 2 Crosslinguistically, the presence of case-markers has been shown to increase the dependency distance between a nominal and its verbal head (e.g., Yadav et al, 2020), perhaps because nominal casemarkers help in making robust predictions about upcoming verbs, as shown by . Therefore, we predict that nominals with case marking should be farther out from the verb than those without.…”

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“…this pattern also comes from a recent cross-linguistic corpus study by Yadav et al (2020) who show that the number of intervening heads is very constrained across languages, and this constraint shows less variability compared to number of intervening words (see, Figures 11,12).…”

“…Given the limited memory resource, it is reasonable to assume that more structure building in the intervening region should lead to more difficultly in processing the unresolved dependency. Consistent with this idea, there is evidence that not only the number, but the complexity of the words that intervene a syntactic dependency matters (e.g, Wasow, 2002;Wasow & Arnold, 2003;Yadav, Vaidya, Shukla, & Husain, 2020). This line of work predicts that the complexity of the linguistic material that intervenes a syntactic dependency will be minimized.…”

“…We call this the Intervener complexity minimization (ICM) hypothesis. In this work we operationalized complexity as the number of syntactic heads that intervene a dependency (Yadav, Vaidya, & Husain, 2017;Yadav et al, 2020); see Figure 1. The rationale behind using number of intervening heads as a measure of complexity comes from the proposal that both structural integrations and temporary storage of linguistic items consume the same pool of limited resource (Gibson, 1998;Just & Carpenter, 1992).…”