Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Morphology and Dependency Distance using Universal Dependencies

by Sean Lang

Communicative efficiency principles are an area of great interest in linguistics research. Analyses are performed into determining how potentially infinite outputs of human language can be formed within the bounds of limited memory. One way in which the cognitive burden of a sentence is measured is through dependency distances. In this thesis, the idea that morphological marking could be used to alleviate communicative memory burdens was evaluated using token-based quantitative typological methods to extract tendencies of language use. Large, multilingual, labeled corpora were parsed to find and evaluate more than 300,000 simple transitive sentences for patterns of morphological agreement and case-marking in relation to dependency distances. No significant, meaningful, cross-linguistic correlation was found between morphological agreement and dependency distances when it was examined in usual patterns of sentence construction. Nor was a correlation found to suggest that marking would allow for longer dependencies in exceptional circumstances, indicating that marking was not of any assistance in alleviating memory burdens. Preliminary evidence was discovered which may suggest an inverse correlation between agreement and dependency distance, advocating for the future work into the process of ensuring agreement increasing cognitive burdens.