Typological Word Order Correlations with Logistic Brownian Motion

Kai Hartung, Gerhard Jäger, Sören Gröttrup, Munir Georges


Abstract
In this study we address the question to what extent syntactic word-order traits of different languages have evolved under correlation and whether such dependencies can be found universally across all languages or restricted to specific language families. To do so, we use logistic Brownian Motion under a Bayesian framework to model the trait evolution for 768 languages from 34 language families. We test for trait correlations both in single families and universally over all families. Separate models reveal no universal correlation patterns and Bayes Factor analysis of models over all covered families also strongly indicate lineage specific correlation patters instead of universal dependencies.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigtyp-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington
Editors:
Ekaterina Vylomova, Edoardo Ponti, Ryan Cotterell
Venue:
SIGTYP
SIG:
SIGTYP
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22–26
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kai Hartung, Gerhard Jäger, Sören Gröttrup, and Munir Georges. 2022. Typological Word Order Correlations with Logistic Brownian Motion. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 22–26, Seattle, Washington. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Typological Word Order Correlations with Logistic Brownian Motion (Hartung et al., SIGTYP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.3.pdf
Code
 hartunka/typologicalwordordercorrelations