Mixed evidence for crosslinguistic dependency length minimization

Abstract

Abstract We investigate whether and to what extent the principle of Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) predicts crosslinguistic syntactic ordering preferences. More specifically, we ask: (i) is there a typological tendency for shorter constituents to appear closer to their syntactic heads in constructions with flexible constituent orderings? (ii) how does the extent of DLM in these constructions vary for languages with different structural characteristics? Our study uses prepositional and postpositional phrase (PP) typology as a testbed. Leveraging multilingual corpora for 34 languages, we focus on sentences with verb phrases that have exactly two PP dependents on the same side of the head verb, the ordering of which under certain conditions contains flexibility. Overall we show a pronounced preference for shorter PPs to be closer to the head verb, establishing the first large-scale quantitative evidence that DLM exists in crosslinguistic syntactic alternations. Furthermore, we present evidence that while the efficacy of DLM depends on the specific ordering structures of different language types, across languages there appears to be a much stronger preference for DLM when the two PPs appear postverbally, compared to no or a much weaker tendency for shorter dependencies when the two PPs occur preverbally. This contrast is the most visible in mixed-type languages with head-initial PPs that can appear both after or before the head verb. Within the limited number of rigid OV languages in our dataset, which have head-final PPs before the head verb, we observe no robust tendency for DLM, in contrast to the patterns in languages with head-initial PPs after the head verb. This contradicts previous findings of a longer-before-short preference in preverbal orders of head-final languages.