Memory limitations are hidden in grammar
Visualitza/Obre
Cita com:
hdl:2117/375988
Tipus de documentArticle
Data publicació2022
Condicions d'accésAccés obert
Llevat que s'hi indiqui el contrari, els
continguts d'aquesta obra estan subjectes a la llicència de Creative Commons
:
Reconeixement-NoComercial-SenseObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional
Abstract
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic dependencies between constituents, independent of the computational limitations of the human brain. Here, we evaluate this independence assumption by sampling sentences uniformly from the space of possible syntactic structures. We find that the average dependency distance between syntactically related words, a proxy for memory limitations, is less than expected by chance in a collection of state-of-the-art classes of dependency grammars. Our findings indicate that memory limitations have permeated grammatical descriptions, suggesting that it may be impossible to build a parsimonious theory of human linguistic productivity independent of non-linguistic cognitive constraints.
CitacióGómez-Rodríguez, C.; Christiansen, M.H.; Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Memory limitations are hidden in grammar. "Glottometrics", 2022, vol. 52, article 397, p. 39-64.
ISSN2625-8226
Col·leccions
Fitxers | Descripció | Mida | Format | Visualitza |
---|---|---|---|---|
2022_52_397.pdf | 482,3Kb | Visualitza/Obre |