ABSTRACT

Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a word order principle favouring the placement of syntactically related words close to each other in sentences. Massive evidence of the principle has been reported for more than a decade with the help of syntactic dependency treebanks where long sentences abound. However, it has been predicted theoretically that the principle is more likely to be beaten in short sequences by the principle of surprisal minimization (predictability maximization). Here we introduce a simple binomial test to verify such a hypothesis. In short sentences, we find anti-DDm for some languages from different families. Our analysis of the syntactic dependency structures suggests that anti-DDm is produced by star trees.

摘要

相依距离最小化（DDm）是一种单词顺序原则，有利于句法上彼此靠近的语法相关单词的放置。十多年来，在句法依赖树库的帮助下，已有大量证据证明了该原理，在那里长句比比皆是。然而，从理论上已经预测到，该原则更有可能在短时间内被意外的最小化（可预测性最大化）原则所击败。在这里，我们介绍了一个简单的二项式检验来验证这种假设。简而言之，我们发现了来自不同家族的某些语言的反DDm。我们对句法依存结构的分析表明，抗-DDm是由星形树产生的。