On formalization of word order properties

Abstract

This paper contains an attempt to formalize the degree of word order freedom for natural languages. It exploits the mechanism of the analysis by reduction and defines a measure based on a number of shifts performed in the course of the analysis. This measure helps to understand the difference between the word order complexity (how difficult it is to parse sentences with more complex word order) and word order freedom in Czech (to which extent it is possible to change the word order without causing a change of individual word forms, their morphological characteristics and/or their surface dependency relations). We exemplify this distinction on a pilot study on Czech sentences with clitics. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.