Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication

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...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 117; no. 5; pp. 2347 - 2353
Main Authors Hahn, Michael, Jurafsky, Dan, Futrell, Richard
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 04.02.2020
Subjects
Ambiguity
Cognition
Communication
Complexity
Computer applications
Computer simulation
Generalization, Psychological - physiology
Grammars
Humans
Information theory
Language
Language Development
Languages
Linguistics - standards
Neural networks
Neural Networks, Computer
Optimization
Order parameters
Social Sciences
Words (language)
computational linguistics
language universals
language processing
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Summary: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 neuralnetwork 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.
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Edited by William Croft, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Susan A. Gelman December 16, 2019 (received for review June 30, 2019)
Author contributions: M.H., D.J., and R.F. designed research; M.H. performed research; and M.H., D.J., and R.F. wrote the paper.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1910923117