The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure - Large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort.

ABSTRACT: Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off

SUBMITTER: Koplenig A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5345836 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature