Cover not available
Article published In:
Diachronic Treebanks
Edited by Hanne Martine Eckhoff, Silvia Luraghi and Marco Passarotti
[Diachronica 35:3] 2018
► pp. 367–392

Non-configurationality in diachrony

Correlations in local and global networks of Ancient Greek and Latin

| University of Cambridge
| University of Pavia

Non-configurationality is a linguistic property associated with free word order, discontinuous constituents, including NPs, and null anaphora of referential arguments. Quantitative metrics, based both on local networks (syntactic trees and word order within sentences) and on global networks (incorporating the relations within a whole treebank into a shared graph), can reveal correlations among these features. Using treebanks we focus on diachronic varieties of Ancient Greek and Latin, in which non-configurationality tapered off over time, leading to the largely configurational nature of the Romance languages and of Modern Greek. A property of global networks (density of their spectra around zero eigenvalues) measuring the regularity in word order is shown to be strengthened from classical to late varieties. Discontinuous NPs are traced by counting the words creating non-projectivity in dependency trees: these drop dramatically in late varieties. Finally, developments in the use of null referential direct objects are gauged by assessing the percentage of third-person personal pronouns among verb objects. All three features turn out to change over time due to the decay of non-configurationality. Evaluation of the strength of their pairwise correlation shows that null direct objects and discontinuous NPs are deeply intertwined.

Keywords: non-configurationality, treebanks, network analysis, non-projectivity, discontinuous constituents, referential null objects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Non-configurationality
    • 2.1Word order
    • 2.2Discontinuous NPs
    • 2.3Definite referential null objects
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Network induction
  • 4.Metrics and results
    • 4.1Free word order
    • 4.2Discontinuous NPs
    • 4.3Referential null objects
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.00007.pon
References

References

Austin, Peter & Joan Bresnan
1996 Non-configurationality in Australian languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 141. 215–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mark
2001 Configurationality and polysynthesis. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook, vol. 21, 1433–1441. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bamman, David, Francesco Mambrini & Gregory Crane
2009 An ownership model of annotation: The Ancient Greek dependency treebank. In Marco Passarotti, Adam Przepiórkowski, Savina Raynaud & Frank van Eynde (eds.), Proceedings of the eighth international workshop on treebanks and linguistic theories (TLT 8), 5–16. Milan: EDUCatt.Google Scholar
Baronchelli, Andrea, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Nick Chater & Morten H. Christiansen
2013 Networks in cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(7). 348–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Čech, Radek, Ján Mačutek & Zdeněk Žabokrtský
2011 The role of syntax in complex networks: Local and global importance of verbs in a syntactic dependency network. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 390(20). 3614–3623. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Choudhury, Munmun, Dipak Chatterjee & Animesh Mukherjee
2010 Global topology of word co-occurrence networks: Beyond the two-regime power-law. In Aravind K. Joshi, Chu-Ren Huang & Dan Jurafsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on computational linguistics: Posters, 162–170. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Danckaert, Lieven
2015 Studying word order changes in Latin: Some methodological considerations. In Carlotta Viti (ed.), Perspectives on historical syntax, 233–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deligianni, Efrosini
2011 Modern Greek word order in the process of syntacticization: Preliminary evidence from Late Byzantine and Early Modern Greek. In Katerina Chatzopoulou, Alexandra Ioannidou & Suwon Yoon (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Greek linguistics (ICGL 9), 440–455. Columbus: The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Devine, Andrew & Laurence Stephens
2000 Discontinuous syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dorogovtsev, Sergey N., José Fernando F. Mendes & Alexander N. Samukhin
2000 Structure of growing networks with preferential linking. Physical review letters 85, no. 21:4633. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dover, Kenneth
1960 Greek word order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon & Richard V. Solé
2001 The small world of human language. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 268(1482). 2261–2265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon, Ricard V. Solé & Reinhard Köhler
2004 Patterns in syntactic dependency networks. Physical Review E 69, no. 5:051915. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Futrell, Richard, Kyle Mahowald & Edward Gibson
2015 Quantifying word order freedom in dependency corpora. In Joakim Nivre & Eva Hajičová (eds.), Proceedings of the third international conference on dependency linguistics (Depling 2015), 91–100. Uppsala: Uppsala University.Google Scholar
Goldstein, David
2016 Classical Greek syntax: Wackernagel’s Law in Herodotus. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gulordava, Kristina & Paola Merlo
2015 Diachronic trends in word order freedom and dependency length in dependency-annotated corpora of Latin and Ancient Greek. In Joakim Nivre & Eva Hajičová (eds.), Proceedings of the third international conference on dependency linguistics (Depling 2015), 121–130. Uppsala: Uppsala University.Google Scholar
Hale, Ken
1983 Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11. 5–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haug, Dag T. T. & Marius L. Jøhndal
2008 Creating a parallel treebank of the Old Indo-European Bible translations. In Caroline Sporleder and Kiril Ribarov (eds.), Proceedings of the workshop on language technology for cultural heritage data (LaTeCH 2008), 27–34. Marrakech, Morocco.Google Scholar
Hewson, John & Vit Bubenik
2006 From case to adposition: The development of configurational syntax in Indo-European languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kapustin, Victor & Anna Jamsen
2007 Vertex degree distribution for the graph of word co-occurrences in Russian. In Chris Biemann, Irina Matveeva, Rada Mihalcea & Dragomir Radev (eds.), Proceedings of the second workshop on TextGraphs: Graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, 89–97. Rochester, NY: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Keydana, Götz & Silvia Luraghi
2012 Definite referential null objects in Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 44(2). 116–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiss, E. Katalin
1987 Configurationality in Hungarian. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam
2011 Morphosyntactic typology and change. In Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith & Adam Ledgeway (eds.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages, vol. 1: Structures, 382–471, 724–734. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2012 From Latin to Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Linde, Paul
1923 Die Stellung des Verbums in der lateinischen Prosa. Glotta 121. 153–178.Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia
1997 Omission of the direct object in Classical Latin. Indogermanische Forschungen 1021. 239–257.Google Scholar
1998 Omissione dell’oggetto diretto in frasi coordinate: Dal latino all’italiano. In Paolo Ramat & Elisa Roma (eds.), 183–196.Google Scholar
2003 Definite referential null objects in Ancient Greek. Indogermanische Forschungen 1081. 169–196.Google Scholar
2010 The rise (and possible downfall) of configurationality. In Silva Luraghi & Vit Bubenik (eds.), Continuum companion to historical linguistics, 212–229. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2013 Clitics. In Silvia Luraghi & Claudia Parodi (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax, 165–193. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Mambrini, Francesco & Marco Passarotti
2013 Non-projectivity in the Ancient Greek dependency treebank. In Eva Hajičová, Kim Gerdes & Leo Wanner (eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on dependency linguistics (Depling 2013): 177–186. Prague: Matfyz Press.Google Scholar
Marcus, Solomon
1965 Sur la notion de projectivité. Mathematical Logic Quarterly 11(2). 181–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meillet, Antoine & Joseph Vendryes
1924 Traité de grammaire comparée des langues classiques. Paris: Champion.Google Scholar
Nivre, Joakim, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Hajic, Christopher D. Manning et al.
2016 Universal dependencies v1: A multilingual treebank collection. In Nicoletta Calzolari (ed.), Proceedings of the tenth international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 16), 1659–1666. Portorož: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar
Ponti, Edoardo M.
2016 Divergence from syntax to linear order in Ancient Greek lexical networks. In Zdravko Markov and Ingrid Russel (eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-ninth international FLAIRS conference, 187–193. Palo Alto: AAAI Press.Google Scholar
Ponti, Edoardo M., & M. Passarotti
2016 Differentia compositionem facit: A slower-paced and reliable parser for Latin. In Proceedings of the tenth international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 16), 683–688. Portorož: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar
Reinöhl, Uta
2016 Grammaticalization and the rise of configurationality in Indo-Aryan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Revithiadou, Anthi & Vassilios Spyropoulos
2007 A typology of Greek clitics with special reference to their diachronic development. Ms., University of the Aegean. [URL] (Last accessed on 11/07/2018.)
2008 Greek object clitic pronouns: A typological survey of their grammatical properties. Language Typology and Universals 61(1). 39–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur
1995 Old Icelandic: A non-configurational language? North-Western European Language Evolution 261. 3–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salvi, Giampaolo
2004 La formazione della struttura di frase romanza. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schäufele, Steven
1990 Free word-order syntax: The challenge from Vedic Sanskrit to contemporary formal syntactic theory. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign dissertation.Google Scholar
Solé, Richard V., Bernat Corominas Murtra, Sergi Valverde & Luc Steels
2010 Language networks: Their structure, function, and evolution. Complexity 15(6). 20–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tesnière, Lucien
1959 Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Hellwig, Oliver, Sebastian Nehrdich & Sven Sellmer
2023. Data-driven dependency parsing of Vedic Sanskrit. Language Resources and Evaluation 57:3 ► pp. 1173 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Jianpeng, Xinzhuo Shen, Haitao Liu & Huifang Du
2023. Dependency network approach to the oral production of English- and Chinese-speaking healthy older adults. Speech, Language and Hearing ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.