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MR2445403 (2009i:68091) 68T50 (91E99 92B99)
Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon (E-BARU-FP)
Some word order biases from limited brain resources: a mathematical approach. (English summary)
Adv. Complex Syst.11 (2008),no. 3,393–414.
A dependency grammar specifies how pairs of words are linked syntactically in a sentence. The Euclidean distance between syntactically related items in a sentence measures the “cost of a sentence”, and it is correlated positively to the cognitive cost. Minimizing this distance results in efficient word orders.
In this paper the effect of word order optimization is shown in two case studies: (i) the ordering of subject (S), verb (V) and object (O), and (ii) the covering of a root word by a syntactic link. In (i), at least two times out of three cases, SVO and its symmetric OVS are more efficient than the other 4 permutations. For (ii), in most cases uncovering the root word is more efficient than covering it.
The author claims that his results provide further support for the hypothesis that the limited resources of the brain cause biases toward certain word orders.
Reviewed byPeter R. J. Asveld
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