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A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal

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...

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Autores principales: Yadav, Himanshu, Mittal, Shubham, Husain, Samar
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MIT Press 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9692064/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36439069
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00060
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author Yadav, Himanshu
Mittal, Shubham
Husain, Samar
author_facet Yadav, Himanshu
Mittal, Shubham
Husain, Samar
author_sort Yadav, Himanshu
collection PubMed
description 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 current study highlights the importance of syntactic heads as central regions of structure building during processing. The results show that when syntactically related words are nonadjacent, increased structure building in the intervening region is avoided.
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spelling pubmed-96920642022-11-25 A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal Yadav, Himanshu Mittal, Shubham Husain, Samar Open Mind (Camb) Research Article 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 current study highlights the importance of syntactic heads as central regions of structure building during processing. The results show that when syntactically related words are nonadjacent, increased structure building in the intervening region is avoided. MIT Press 2022-09-15 /pmc/articles/PMC9692064/ /pubmed/36439069 http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00060 Text en © 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Research Article
Yadav, Himanshu
Mittal, Shubham
Husain, Samar
A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal
title A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal
title_full A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal
title_fullStr A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal
title_full_unstemmed A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal
title_short A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal
title_sort reappraisal of dependency length minimization as a linguistic universal
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9692064/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36439069
http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00060
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