论文标题
跨语言顺序变化反映了依赖性和信息局部的进化压力
Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality
论文作者
论文摘要
语言在句法结构上有很大差异。世界上约40％的语言具有主语对象顺序，约40％的语言具有主题 - 对象 - 动词顺序。广泛的工作试图解释跨语言的单词顺序变化。但是，现有方法无法用单个语言的单词顺序频率分布和演变来解释。我们建议，单词顺序的变化反映了平衡依赖性区域和信息局部性竞争压力的不同方式，当元素与句法相关或上下文相互信息时，语言倾向于将它们放在一起。使用来自17个语言家族的80种语言的数据和系统发育建模，我们证明了语言的发展以平衡这些压力，因此单词顺序变化伴随着句法结构的频率分布的变化，这些句法结构的频率分布会说话，以维持整体效率。因此，单词顺序的可变性反映了语言解决这些进化压力的不同方式。我们确定了该关节优化产生的相关特征，尤其是对同一动词共同表达对象和对象的频率。我们的发现表明，跨语言的句法结构和用法共同适应有限的认知资源，以支持有效的沟通。
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across languages. However, the existing approaches are not able to explain coherently the frequency distribution and evolution of word order in individual languages. We propose that variation in word order reflects different ways of balancing competing pressures of dependency locality and information locality, whereby languages favor placing elements together when they are syntactically related or contextually informative about each other. Using data from 80 languages in 17 language families and phylogenetic modeling, we demonstrate that languages evolve to balance these pressures, such that word order change is accompanied by change in the frequency distribution of the syntactic structures which speakers communicate to maintain overall efficiency. Variability in word order thus reflects different ways in which languages resolve these evolutionary pressures. We identify relevant characteristics that result from this joint optimization, particularly the frequency with which subjects and objects are expressed together for the same verb. Our findings suggest that syntactic structure and usage across languages co-adapt to support efficient communication under limited cognitive resources.
