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The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure – Large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort

  • Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that–despite differences in the way information is expressed–there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways.

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Metadaten
Author:Alexander KoplenigORCiDGND, Peter MeyerGND, Sascha WolferORCiDGND, Carolin Müller-SpitzerORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-59714
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173614
Parent Title (English):PLoS ONE
Editor:Kenny Smith
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2017
Date of Publication (online):2017/03/13
Publicationstate:Veröffentlichungsversion
Reviewstate:Peer-Review
Tag:grammatical information; structural information; word order; word structure
GND Keyword:Informationsstruktur; Sprachstatistik; Wortstellung
Volume:12
Issue:3
First Page:1
Last Page:25
Note:
The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access fund of the Leibniz Association.
DDC classes:400 Sprache
Open Access?:ja
Leibniz-Classification:Sprache, Linguistik
Linguistics-Classification:Quantitative Linguistik
Program areas:Lexik
Licence (English):License LogoCreative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International