Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication

• Published in: Proceedings 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
• Language: English
• 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

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...