The Hierarchical Organization of Syntax

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the hierarchical organization of historical German syntactic networks to understand how syntax evolves diachronically, emphasizing the role of communicative needs in shaping syntactic structures over centuries.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to empirically track the emergence of syntactic structures over time and links these structures to speakers' communicative needs.

Findings

Communicative needs drive the organization of syntactic hierarchies.

Syntactic structures evolve to meet increasing communicative complexity.

Languages develop more sophisticated abstractions for communication.

Abstract

Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks that capture their structure and function. Hence, we decided to analyze the hierarchical organization of historical syntactic networks to understand how syntax evolves over time. We created these networks from a corpus of German texts from the 11th to 17th centuries, focusing on the hierarchical levels of these networks. diachronically and to map them to specific communicative needs of speakers. We developed a framework to empirically track the emergence of syntactic structures diachronically, enabling us to map the communicative needs of speakers with these structures. We named these syntactic structures "syntactic communicative hierarchies." We showed that the communicative needs of speakers are the organizational force of syntax. Thus, we argue that the emergence of syntactic communicative hierarchies plays a crucial role in shaping syntax over time. This may indicate that languages evolve not only to increase the efficiency of transferring information, but also to increase our capacity, as a species, to communicate our needs with more and more sophisticated abstractions.