2025/09/03 by Ebert, Christian, Cathcart, Chundra, Bickel, Balthasar +1
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Language and cultural evolution #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.5167/uzh-280272
openalex publication_date 2025/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper introduces a new corpus-based approach for studying word order change and reconstruction with Bayesian computational phylogenetic methods. We investigate the rates of change in object-verb order in 46 sentences from 36 Indo-European languages extracted from a parallel corpus. A Gaussian mixture model reveals that the rates can be grouped into three components representing syntactic constructions with distinct diachronic dynamics. Contexts with nominal objects are relatively stable, whereas object-verb order in contexts with pronominal objects evolves fast. Complement clauses have a strong diachronic bias towards VO. Stochastic character mapping suggests a VO order of nominal objects and verb in Proto-Indo-European, while the fast rates in contexts with pronominal objects do not allow a reliable reconstruction of ancestral states.