Word Order Variation is Partially Constrained by Syntactic Complexity

Abstract

Previous work suggests that when speakers linearize syntactic structures, they place longer and more complex dependents further away from the head word to which they belong than shorter and simpler dependents, and that they do so with increasing rigidity the longer expressions get, for example, longer objects tend to be placed further away from their verb, and with less variation. Current theories of sentence processing furthermore make competing predictions on whether longer expressions are preferentially placed as early or as late as possible. Here we test these predictions using hierarchical distributional regression models that allow estimates of word order and word order variation at the level of individual dependencies in corpora from 71 languages, while controlling for confounding effects from the type of dependency (e.g., subject vs. object), and the type of clause (main vs. subordinate) involved as well as from trends that are characteristic of individual languages, language families, and language contact areas. Our results show the expected correlations of length with position and variation only for two out of six dependency types (obliques and nominal modifiers) and no difference between clause types. These findings challenge received theories of across‐the‐board effects of complexity on word order and word order variation and call for theoretical models that relativize effects to specific kinds of syntactic structures and dependencies.

The role of language documentation in corpus-based typology

“…Behaghel 1909;Dryer 1992;Hawkins 2014Hawkins , 2004. How DLM shapes actual language use has now been directly investigated comparatively in corpora from over 50 languages (Futrell et al 2020;Jing et al 2021). Similarly, there are now corpus-based results on the avoidance of crossing dependencies (Blasi et al 2019), as well as cross-linguistic differences in word order variability (more or less "free" word order) (Futrell et al 2015;Levshina 2019) and the trade-off between word order variability and case marking (Koplenig et al 2017;Levshina 2019Levshina , 2021b.…”