Publications

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  • Levshina, N. (2020). How tight is your language? A semantic typology based on Mutual Information. In K. Evang, L. Kallmeyer, R. Ehren, S. Petitjean, E. Seyffarth, & D. Seddah (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (pp. 70-78). Düsseldorf, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.tlt-1.7.

    Abstract

    Languages differ in the degree of semantic flexibility of their syntactic roles. For example, Eng-
    lish and Indonesian are considered more flexible with regard to the semantics of subjects,
    whereas German and Japanese are less flexible. In Hawkins’ classification, more flexible lan-
    guages are said to have a loose fit, and less flexible ones are those that have a tight fit. This
    classification has been based on manual inspection of example sentences. The present paper
    proposes a new, quantitative approach to deriving the measures of looseness and tightness from
    corpora. We use corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora Collection in thirty typolog-
    ically and genealogically diverse languages and parse them syntactically with the help of the
    Universal Dependencies annotation software. Next, we compute Mutual Information scores for
    each language using the matrices of lexical lemmas and four syntactic dependencies (intransi-
    tive subjects, transitive subject, objects and obliques). The new approach allows us not only to
    reproduce the results of previous investigations, but also to extend the typology to new lan-
    guages. We also demonstrate that verb-final languages tend to have a tighter relationship be-
    tween lexemes and syntactic roles, which helps language users to recognize thematic roles early
    during comprehension.

    Additional information

    full text via ACL website
  • Levshina, N. (2020). Efficient trade-offs as explanations in functional linguistics: some problems and an alternative proposal. Revista da Abralin, 19(3), 50-78. doi:10.25189/rabralin.v19i3.1728.

    Abstract

    The notion of efficient trade-offs is frequently used in functional linguis-tics in order to explain language use and structure. In this paper I argue that this notion is more confusing than enlightening. Not every negative correlation between parameters represents a real trade-off. Moreover, trade-offs are usually reported between pairs of variables, without taking into account the role of other factors. These and other theoretical issues are illustrated in a case study of linguistic cues used in expressing “who did what to whom”: case marking, rigid word order and medial verb posi-tion. The data are taken from the Universal Dependencies corpora in 30 languages and annotated corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora collection. We find that not all cues are correlated negatively, which ques-tions the assumption of language as a zero-sum game. Moreover, the cor-relations between pairs of variables change when we incorporate the third variable. Finally, the relationships between the variables are not always bi-directional. The study also presents a causal model, which can serve as a more appropriate alternative to trade-offs.

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