Typometrics: From Implicational to Quantitative Universals in Word Order Typology

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of word order universals based on a data analysis of the Universal Dependencies project, which proposes treebanks of more than 90 languages encoded with the same annotation scheme. The nature of the data we work on allows us to extract rich details for testing well-known typological implicational universals and, further, explore new kinds of universals that we call quantitative universals. We show how such quantitative universals are in essence different from implicational universals, including statistical universals, by the fact that they no longer lay down any claims on categorical statements, but rather on continuous parameters, opening a new field of research we propose to call typometrics.

Keywords

• Typology
• Syntax
• treebanks
• computational typology
• word order
• statistical universals