A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal

ABSTRACT: Dependency length minimization is widely regarded as a cross-linguistic universal reflecting syntactic complexity in natural languages. A typical way to operationalize dependency length in corpus-based studies has been to count the number of words between syntactically related words. However, such a formulation ignores the syntactic nature of the linguistic material that intervenes a dependency. In this work, we investigate if the number of syntactic heads (rather than the number of words) that intervene a dependency better captures the syntactic complexity across languages. We demonstrate that the dependency length minimization constraint in terms of the number of words could arise as a consequence of constraints on the intervening heads and the tree properties such as node arity. The cur

SUBMITTER: Yadav H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9692064 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature