Word order theory. Swap distance minimization

The syntactic structure of a sentence can be seen as a graph where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. Research on these structures has lead to the discovery of many statistical patterns. Some of them have been raised to the category of principles while others have been hypothesized to be manifestations of principles. In this talk, I will review this theoretical framework and delve into the order of four major constituents of a sentence, i.e. Subject, Verb, Object and Indirect Object, in large samples of languages to uncover the action of a recently introduced principle: swap distance minimization. According to that principle, word orders that differ by just one swap of adjacent constituents are easier to process than word orders that differ by the movement of constituents that are farther away. The setting is linguistic but the problem reduces to a space where points are distinct orderings of components and the distance between points is defined by a graph of swaps. I will sketch potential applications to biology.

Presential in the IFISC seminar room

Zoom stream at: https://zoom.us/j/98286706234?pwd=bm1JUFVYcTJkaVl1VU55L0FiWDRIUT09