Word Order, Marking, and Parts-of-Speech Systems

Abstract

Parts-of-speech systems, as defined by Hengeveld et al. in their 2004 article on parts-of-speech systems and word order, form the framework for this article, in which we investigate how the distribution of languages with respect to certain linguistic features is related to the number of propositional functions and the number of lexeme classes. The linguistic features are the presence or absence of fixed word order and markers, which may disambiguate between different propositional functions. We show that the relation can be modelled by a three-dimensional generalization of the sigmoid, for which we provide theoretical justification.

Acknowledgement

The first author's work on this article was done while he was visiting the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Trier. This author wishes to express his gratitude to the hosting institution, to Kent State University for sabbatical leave during which the visit took place, and to Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for financial support.

Notes

¹The term ‘correlation’ is used here to denote in a neutral way that two variables vary together, without reference to a specific function or direction of dependency.

²The criterion used to reach this conclusion is relevant for the definition of parts of speech adopted in the present study. Otherwise, there are many other criteria for differentiating nouns and adjectives in Hungarian – see Moravcsik (2001) or consider the fact that magas has comparative form (magasabb‘taller’), while fiú does not.