A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order
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tacl_a_00589.pdf
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Published version
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1.51 MB
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Author(s)
Clark, Thomas Hikaru
Meister, Clara
Pimentel, Tiago
Hahn, Michael
Cotterell, Ryan
Futrell, Richard
Levy, Roger
Date Issued
August 15, 2023
Journal
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Thomas Hikaru Clark, Clara Meister, Tiago Pimentel, Michael Hahn, Ryan Cotterell, Richard Futrell, Roger Levy; A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2023; 11 1048–1065.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00589
