A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order

2017/09/08 by Richard Futrell, Roger Lévy, Futrell, Richard +3
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1709.02783

openalex publication_date 2017/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson regression to statistically compare some prominent accounts of this variation. We compare feature systems derived from Cinque (2005) to feature systems given in Cysouw (2010) and Dryer (in prep). In this setting, we do not find clear reasons to prefer the model of Cinque (2005) or Dryer (in prep), but we find both of these models have substantially better fit to the typological data than the model from Cysouw (2010).

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