Syntactic dependencies are head/modifier relations between words in a sentence that organize sentences into a syntactic tree structure. The general principle that languages have a preference to group syntactically related words close together can be made precise as a preference for shorter dependencies. We examine evidence for this principle in the development of languages’ grammars as well as in the choices made by individual speakers where syntactic variation is licensed. We survey evidence from corpus studies, computational simulations, and experiments on comprehension; altogether, this evidence makes a compelling case for dependency length minimization as an important factor in language structure and cognition.

中文翻译：

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最小化句法依赖长度：类型学/认知通用性？

句法依存关系是将句子组织成句法树状结构的句子中各个词之间的头/修饰词关系。可以将语言偏爱将语法相关的单词紧密组合在一起的一般原则作为对较短依存关系的偏爱进行精确描述。我们在语言语法的发展中以及在许可使用句法变体的单个说话人的选择中检验了这一原则的证据。我们调查了来自语料库研究，计算模拟和理解实验的证据；总而言之，这一证据为使依赖长度最小化成为语言结构和认知的重要因素提供了令人信服的理由。