A Formal Universal of Natural Language Grammar
- Submitting institution
-
University of Edinburgh
- Unit of assessment
- 11 - Computer Science and Informatics
- Output identifier
- 177505469
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.1353/lan.2020.0043
- Title of journal
- Language
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 618
- Volume
- 96
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 0097-8507
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
D - Language, Interaction and Robotics
- Citation count
- 1
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This sole-authored article presents the first theoretically-predicted universal constraint limiting word-order-variation cross-linguistically. It restricts any given construction to "separable" permutations of a semantically-determined "natural order of dominance". The paper provides hard statistical evidence that this constraint does in fact hold across several representative constructions in very many languages. Since the number of such permutations grows much more slowly than factorially in the size of the construction, it is also important for computational applications such as machine-translation and sentence-processing. These implications are explored more fully in an article to appear in Computational Linguistics, the leading international journal in its eponymous field.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -