Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies?
- In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of theIn syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness.…
Verfasserangaben: | Himanshu YadavORCiDGND, Samar HusainORCiD, Richard Futrell |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0070 |
ISSN: | 2199-174X |
Titel des übergeordneten Werks (Englisch): | Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal |
Verlag: | De Gruyter Mouton |
Verlagsort: | Berlin ; New York, NY |
Publikationstyp: | Wissenschaftlicher Artikel |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Datum der Erstveröffentlichung: | 21.04.2021 |
Erscheinungsjahr: | 2021 |
Datum der Freischaltung: | 01.03.2024 |
Freies Schlagwort / Tag: | crossing dependencies; dependency length; dependency treebanks; efficiency; language processing; syntax |
Band: | 7 |
Aufsatznummer: | 20190070 |
Seitenanzahl: | 15 |
Organisationseinheiten: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC-Klassifikation: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Peer Review: | Referiert |
Lizenz (Deutsch): | Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz |