A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order

TL;DR

This paper uses Poisson regression to statistically compare different linguistic theories explaining the variation in word order within noun phrases across languages, finding that some models fit the data better than others.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative comparison of prominent linguistic feature systems for NP word order, highlighting which models better explain typological variation.

Findings

Cinque (2005) and Dryer models fit data better than Cysouw (2010)

No clear preference between Cinque and Dryer models

Statistical approach clarifies differences among theories

Abstract

A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun} in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson regression to statistically compare some prominent accounts of this variation. We compare feature systems derived from Cinque (2005) to feature systems given in Cysouw (2010) and Dryer (in prep). In this setting, we do not find clear reasons to prefer the model of Cinque (2005) or Dryer (in prep), but we find both of these models have substantially better fit to the typological data than the model from Cysouw (2010).