2023/01/31 by Fermı́n Moscoso del Prado Martı́n, Martín, Fermín Moscoso del Prado
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Digital Communication and Language #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language Development and Disorders #Language and cultural evolution #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.00129
openalex publication_date 2023/01/31 · openalex created_date 2023/02/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their topologies. This study investigates how the topologies of syntactic graphs reveal traces of the processes that led to their emergence. I report a new universal regularity in syntactic structures: Their topology is communicatively efficient above chance. The pattern holds, without exception, for all 124 languages studied, across linguistic families and modalities (spoken, written, and signed). This pattern can arise from a process optimizing for communicative efficiency or, alternatively, by construction, as a by-effect of a sublinear preferential attachment process reflecting language production mechanisms known from psycholinguistics. This dual explanation shows how communicative efficiency, per se, does not require optimization. Among the two options, efficiency without optimization offers the better explanation for the new pattern.