Sociomeeting: Exploring linguistic relations through memory effects in parts-of-speech sequences

Measuring distances among languages can provide valuable insights not only into linguistic families and language evolution but also into language learning and coexistence. However, this task poses challenges due to the vast linguistic diversity and the complexity of linguistic levels. The method I will present in this talk follows an information-theoretic approach to analyze correlations within parts-of-speech sequences, which serves as a robust basis to compute syntactic distances between languages. Including a comprehensive corpus of contemporary languages, this technique allows us to recover established linguistic relations and to explore the connection between geographic and linguistic distances.