We investigate structural traces of language contact in the intermediate representations of a monolingual language model. Focusing on Persian (Farsi) as a historically contact-rich language, we probe the representations of a Persian-trained model when exposed to languages with varying degrees and types of contact with Persian. Our methodology quantifies the amount of linguistic information encoded in intermediate representations and assesses how this information is distributed across model components for different morphosyntactic features. The results show that universal syntactic information is largely insensitive to historical contact, whereas morphological features such as CASE and GENDER are strongly shaped by language-specific structure, suggesting that contact effects in monolingual language models are selective and structurally constrained.

Universal Dependencies (UD) is a global initiative to create a standard annotation for the dependency syntax of human languages. Addressing its deviation from typological principles, this study presents an empirical investigation of a typologically motivated transformation of UD proposed by William Croft. Our findings underscore the significance of the transformations across diverse languages and highlight their advantages and limitations.