Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths |
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| Authors: | Ramon Ferrer‐I‐Cancho Carlos Gómez‐Rodríguez |
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| Institution: | 1. Complexity & Qualitative Linguistics Lab, LARCA Research Group, Departament De Ciències De La Computació, Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya, Campus Nord, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain;2. LyS Research Group, Departamento De Computación, Facultade De Informática, Universidade Da Coru?a, A Coru?a, Spain |
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| Abstract: | The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend arises from an independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths, that is, sentences with shorter dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We are able to reject the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of language. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 320–328, 2016 |
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| Keywords: | human language dependency length syntactic dependencies projectivity |
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