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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16: Selected papers from the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Newark, Delaware
Edited by Irene Vogel
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16] 2020
► pp. 109–132

Computational quantitative syntax

The case of Universal 18

| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva

Accounting for the constraints on the possible word orders of a sentence in a language and across the world languages is a core challenge for syntactic theory. In the spirit of computational quantitative syntax, in this paper we present quantitative evidence about Universal 18. We show that corpus data confirms a dispreference for the word order combination where adjectives precede but numerals follow the nouns (Adj-N and N-Num). We then investigate if this dispreference is better explained as a constraint expressed at the level of the dominant orders or at the level of individual structures. Corpus counts support the latter interpretation. Finally, we propose a formal model of how this bias against Adj-N-Num orders can be integrated in the grammar.

Keywords: Universal 18, quantitative syntax, corpus counts, adjective-noun order, noun-numeral order, treebanks, Latin, Ancient Greek, modelling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Typological data on Universal 18
  • 3.Accounts of language universals and Universal 18
    • 3.1Structure-level accounts
    • 3.2Grammar-level accounts
  • 4.Our approach to Universal 18
    • 4.1Cross-linguistic corpus data
      • Corpus data for Latin and Ancient Greek
      • Preprocessing and collection of counts
      • Collected counts
    • 4.2Results and discussion
  • 5.Towards a model explaining Universal 18
    • 5.1Comparison of models 1 and 2
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.16.08gul
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