Syntactic structures and the general Markov models

Abstract

We further the theme of studying syntactic structures data from Longobardi (2017b), Collins (2010), Ceolin et al. (2020) and Koopman (2011) using general Markov models initiated in Shu et al. (2017), exploring the question of how consistent the data is with the idea that general Markov models. The ideas explored in the present paper are more generally applicable than to the setting of syntactic structures, and can be used when analyzing consistency of data with general Markov models. Additionally, we give an interpretation of the methods of Ceolin et al. (2020) as an infinite sites evolutionary model and compare it to the Markov model and explore each in the context of evolutionary processes acting on human language syntax.