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Published on: September 5, 2019
Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication
Michael Hahn1, Dan Jurafsky2, Richard Futrell3
1Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; mhahn2@stanford.edu.
Abstract:
The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties-those related to word order-result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models of complexity and ambiguity and simulate grammars with optimized word-order parameters on large-scale data from 51 languages. Evolution of grammars toward efficiency results in word-order patterns that predict a large subset of the major word-order correlations across languages.
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