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Abstract

Dependency length minimization is widely regarded as a cross-linguistic universal capturing syntactic complexity in natural languages. A typical way to operationalize dependency length in corpus-based studies is to count the number of words between syntactically related words. However, such a formulation ignores the syntactic nature of the linguistic material that intervenes the dependency. We present a cross-linguistic corpus study to argue that the number of syntactic heads (rather than words) that intervene a dependency better captures the syntactic complexity across languages. We demonstrate that the dependency length minimization constraint in terms of number of words is a consequence of constraints on intervening heads and tree properties such as arity. The current study shows that when syntactically related words are non-adjacent, increased structure building in the intervening region is avoided.