Paper

The Crosslinguistic Relationship between Ordering Flexibility and Dependency Length Minimization: A Data-Driven Approach

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Abstract

This paper asks whether syntactic constructions with more flexible constituent orderings have a weaker tendency for dependency length minimization (DLM). For test cases, I use verb phrases in which the head verb has one direct object noun phrase (NP) dependent and exactly on adopositional phrase (PP) dependent adjacent to each other on the same side (e.g. Kobe prasied [_NP his oldest daughter] [_PP from the stands]). Data from multilingual corpora of 36 languages show that when combining all these languages together, there is no consistent relationship between flexibility and DLM. When looking at specific ordering domains, on average there appears to be a weaker preference for shorter dependencies in constructions with more flexibility mostly in preverbal contexts, while no correlation exists between the two in postverbal domains.

Keywords: ordering flexibility, dependency length minimization, data-driven

How to Cite:

Liu, Z., (2021) “The Crosslinguistic Relationship between Ordering Flexibility and Dependency Length Minimization: A Data-Driven Approach”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 264-274. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/xt42-4282