This paper confirms that, in English binary coordinations, left conjuncts tend to be shorter than right conjuncts, regardless of the position of the governor of the coordination. We demonstrate that this tendency becomes stronger when length differences are greater, but only when the governor is on the left or absent, not when it is on the right. We explain this effect via Dependency Length Minimization and we show that this explanation provides support for symmetrical dependency structures of coordination (where coordination is multi-headed by all conjuncts, as in Word Grammar or in enhanced Universal Dependencies, or where it single-headed by the conjunction, as in the Prague Dependency Treebank), as opposed to asymmetrical structures (where coordination is headed by the first conjunct, as in the Meaning–Text Theory or in basic Universal Dependencies).

Fictional prose can be broadly divided into narrative and discursive forms with direct speech being central to any discourse representation (alongside indirect reported speech and free indirect discourse). This distinction is crucial in digital literary studies and enables interesting forms of narratological or stylistic analysis. The difficulty of automatically detecting direct speech, however, is currently under-estimated. Rule-based systems that work reasonably well for modern languages struggle with (the lack of) typographical conventions in 19th-century literature. While machine learning approaches to sequence modeling can be applied to solve the task, they typically face a severed skewness in the availability of training material, especially for lesser resourced languages. In this paper, we report the result of a multilingual approach to direct speech detection in a diverse corpus of 19th-century fiction in 9 European languages. The proposed method finetunes a transformer architecture with multilingual sentence embedder on a minimal amount of annotated training in each language, and improves performance across languages with ambiguous direct speech marking, in comparison to a carefully constructed regular expression baseline.