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Can Greenbergian universals be induced from language networks?

Publikace

Tento text není v aktuálním jazyce dostupný. Zobrazuje se verze "en".Abstrakt

Language networks have been proposed to be the underlying representation for syntactic knowledge

(Roelofs, 1992; Pickering and Branigan, 1998). Such networks are known to explain various wordorder related priming effects in psycholinguistics. Under the assumption that word order informationis encoded in these networks, we explore if Greenbergian word order universals (Greenberg,1963) can be induced from such networks. Language networks for 34 languages were constructedfrom the Universal Dependencies Treebank (Nivre et al., 2016) based on the assumptions in Roelofs

(1992); Pickering and Branigan (1998). We conducted a series of experiments to investigate if certainnetwork parameters can be used to cluster various languages based on the word order typologyproposed by Greenberg. Our results show that some network parameters robustly cluster the languagescorrectly, thereby providing some support for language network as a valid representation forsuch linguistic generalizations.