Response to Liu, Xu, and Liang (2015) and Ferrer-i-Cancho and G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez (2015) on Dependency Length Minimization

TL;DR

This paper defends prior empirical evidence for dependency length minimization across languages against recent criticisms, emphasizing the novelty and robustness of their baseline methods and addressing previous oversights.

Contribution

It clarifies the novelty of their work in establishing dependency length minimization as a universal property and defends their baseline choices against critiques.

Findings

Provides strong empirical evidence for dependency length minimization across languages

Addresses and corrects previous oversight regarding Liu (2008)'s work

Justifies baseline choices as controlling for alternative theories

Abstract

We address recent criticisms (Liu et al., 2015; Ferrer-i-Cancho and G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez, 2015) of our work on empirical evidence of dependency length minimization across languages (Futrell et al., 2015). First, we acknowledge error in failing to acknowledge Liu (2008)'s previous work on corpora of 20 languages with similar aims. A correction will appear in PNAS. Nevertheless, we argue that our work provides novel, strong evidence for dependency length minimization as a universal quantitative property of languages, beyond this previous work, because it provides baselines which focus on word order preferences. Second, we argue that our choices of baselines were appropriate because they control for alternative theories.