Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31964811.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.1910923117 and PMC identifier 7007543.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
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 neural-network 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.
Medical subject headings
- Generalization, Psychological
- Language