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Abstract While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.1
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Are cross-linguistically frequent systems easier to learn? The case of evidentiality.
It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn (Typological Prevalence Hypothesis - TPH). Prior work supports this hypothesis in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. Using an Artificial Language Learning paradigm, we explore the learnability of semantic distinctions within the domain of evidentiality (i.e. the linguistic encoding of information sources). Our results support the TPH, since the most prevalent evidential system was learned best while the most rare evidentiality system yielded the worst learnability results. Furthermore, our results indicate that, cross-linguistically, indirect information sources seem to be marked preferentially (and acquired more easily) compared to direct sources. We explain this pattern in terms of the pragmatic need to mark indirect, potentially more unreliable sources over direct sources of information. The Document
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- Award ID(s):
- 1632849
- PAR ID:
- 10147297
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
- ISSN:
- 1069-7977
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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