Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

It has been extensively observed that languages minimise the distance between two related words. Dependency length minimisation (DLM) effects explain many patterns of word order variation across languages. In this talk, I show how we can formalise the very general DLM principle based on dependency annotations of treebanks to compute and compare the rates at which different languages minimise dependencies. The DLM measure allows us to observe subtle changes in the word order in diachronic treebanks of Latin and Ancient Greek. Next, I will apply the DLM principle to the Noun Phrase. The analysis gives predictions about the adjective-noun word order variation which align well with the previously reported observations and which we confirm on a large-scale using the dependency-annotated data from five Romance languages.