Generalizing dependency distance: Comment on “Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages” by Haitao Liu et al.

With the support of the comprehensive review in Liu et al. [14], we consider dependency distance minimization to be firmly established as a quantitative property of syntactic trees. In this comment, we consider future empirical and theoretical directions for this concept, including a recent information-theoretic reinterpretation of dependency locality effects as proposed by Futrell and Levy [4].