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Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication.

ABSTRACT: The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties-those related to word order-result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models of complexity and ambiguity and simulate grammars with optimized word-order parameters on large-scale data from 51 languages. Evolution of grammars toward efficiency results in word-order patterns that predict a large subset of the major word-order correlations across languages.

SUBMITTER: Hahn M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7007543 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication.

Hahn Michael M Jurafsky Dan D Futrell Richard R

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20200121 5

The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties-those related to word order-result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models ...[more]

PMID: 31964811

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