Optimality of syntactic dependency distances

Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon; Gómez-Rodríguez, Carlos; Esteban, Juan Luis; Alemany-Puig, Lluís

doi:10.1103/physreve.105.014308

Cited by 25 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 101 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We suggest that the distinction between SVO as a syntactically preferred order and SOV as characteristic of pre‐linguistic communication fails to capture the full picture of what is going on, in contrast to, for example, Ferrer‐i‐Cancho's ( 2017 ) account of the different factors that influence natural language ordering preferences. He suggests an account of word order preferences that emerge due to the interaction between different cognitive constraints, such as syntactic dependency minimization and surprisal minimization (Ferrer‐i‐Cancho, 2017 ; Ferrer‐i‐Cancho, Gómez‐Rodríguez, Esteban, & Alemany‐Puig, 2022 ). Previous silent gesture research has also suggested that a preference for SVO orders can be explained with domain‐general accounts, namely a bias to place subjects first regardless of the other constituents, and the robustness to noise of SVO order, particularly for reversible events where subject and object can be confused (Gibson et al., 2013 ; Hall et al., 2014 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Of the six possible orderings of the three main constituents of language (subject, verb, and object), two—SOV and SVO—are predominant cross‐linguistically. Previous research using the silent gesture paradigm in which hearing participants produce or respond to gestures without speech has shown that different factors such as reversibility, salience, and animacy can affect the preferences for different orders. Here, we test whether participants’ preferences for orders that are conditioned on the semantics of the event change depending on (i) the iconicity of individual gestural elements and (ii) the prior knowledge of a conventional lexicon. Our findings demonstrate the same preference for semantically conditioned word order found in previous studies, specifically that SOV and SVO are preferred differentially for different types of events. We do not find that iconicity of individual gestures affects participants’ ordering preferences; however, we do find that learning a lexicon leads to a stronger preference for SVO‐like orders overall. Finally, we compare our findings from English speakers, using an SVO‐dominant language, with data from speakers of an SOV‐dominant language, Turkish. We find that, while learning a lexicon leads to an increase in SVO preference for both sets of participants, this effect is mediated by language background and event type, suggesting that an interplay of factors together determines preferences for different ordering patterns. Taken together, our results support a view of word order as a gradient phenomenon responding to multiple biases.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As de Marneffe and Nivre (2019: 205) conclude, "dependency trees can thus capture generalizations better in languages with free or flexible word order than phrase structure trees". This is also evidenced by the number of treebanks favoring dependencies in their annotations (Bouma et al, 2000;Kromann, 2003;Oflazer et al, 2003), and by typological work comparing structures in different languages (Nichols, 1986;Liu, 2008;Futrell et al, 2015b;Chen & Gerdes, 2017;Ferrer-i-Cancho et al, 2022).…”

Section: Free-word Order Languagesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Notational Variants and Cognition: The Case of Dependency Grammar

Nefdt

Baggio

2023

Erkenn

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In recent years, dependency grammars have established themselves as valuable tools in theoretical and computational linguistics. To many linguists, dependency grammars and the more standard constituency-based formalisms are notational variants. We argue that, beyond considerations of formal equivalence, cognition may also serve as a background for a genuine comparison between these different views of syntax. In this paper, we review and evaluate some of the most common arguments and evidence employed to advocate for the cognitive or neural reality of dependency grammars in linguistics, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics. We then raise the possibility that the abilities to represent and track, alternatively or in parallel, constituency and dependency structures co-exist in human cognition and are constitutive of syntactic competence.

show abstract

“…Thus, if the linked words are consecutive they are at distance 1, if they are separated by an intermediate word they are at distance two, and so on, as shown in Figure 1. Dependency distance minimization is a pressure to reduce the distance between syntactically related words that is supported statistically by large-scale analyses of syntactic dependency structures in languages (Ferrer-i-Cancho et al, 2022;Futrell et al, 2020;Futrell et al, 2015;Jing et al, 2021;Liu, 2008). As such, dependency distance minimization is a type of memory constraint, believed to result from pressure against decay of activation or interference during the processing of sentences (Liu et al, 2017;Temperley and Gildea, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory limitations are hidden in grammar

Gómez-Rodríguez¹,

Christiansen²,

Ferrer-i-Cancho³

2022

Glottometrics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic dependencies between constituents, independent of the computational limitations of the human brain. Here, we evaluate this independence assumption by sampling sentences uniformly from the space of possible syntactic structures. We find that the average dependency distance between syntactically related words, a proxy for memory limitations, is less than expected by chance in a collection of state-of-the-art classes of dependency grammars. Our findings indicate that memory limitations have permeated grammatical descriptions, suggesting that it may be impossible to build a parsimonious theory of human linguistic productivity independent of non-linguistic cognitive constraints.

show abstract

Optimality of syntactic dependency distances

Cited by 25 publications

References 101 publications

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences

Notational Variants and Cognition: The Case of Dependency Grammar

Memory limitations are hidden in grammar

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About