Movement and structure effects on Universal 20 word order frequencies: A quantitative study

Abstract

In this paper, we illustrate a novel method to translate a derivational explanation of Universal 20 into vectorial representations. We exploit this vectorial representation to answer a number of theoretical questions. First, we use linear regression to automatically rank the costs of different syntactic movements within this proposal and investigate some proposals on partial and complete movement. This investigation of movement suggests that the nature of the movement is important, while the importance of harmonic specification of functional categories, i.e. whether the movement is partial or complete, is more context-dependent. We then evaluate whether the base order dem num adj n is the best predictor of the typological facts. We compare different syntactic proposals on the position of numerals in the noun phrase. We find that a merge position of numerals higher than adjectives has better results in both methods. We also show, using this method, that the independently motivated low merge position for numerals can only be semantically motivated, which results in intra-linguistic variation, and is not a parametric choice.