A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order
Computation and Language
2017-09-11 v1
Abstract
A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun} in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson regression to statistically compare some prominent accounts of this variation. We compare feature systems derived from Cinque (2005) to feature systems given in Cysouw (2010) and Dryer (in prep). In this setting, we do not find clear reasons to prefer the model of Cinque (2005) or Dryer (in prep), but we find both of these models have substantially better fit to the typological data than the model from Cysouw (2010).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1709.02783,
title = {A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order},
author = {Richard Futrell and Roger Levy and Matthew Dryer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.02783},
year = {2017}
}