Universal Topological Regularities of Syntactic Structures: Decoupling Efficiency from Optimization

TL;DR

This paper uncovers a universal topological regularity in syntactic graphs across 124 languages, showing they are communicatively efficient without necessarily being optimized through traditional processes.

Contribution

It reveals a universal regularity in syntactic graph topologies, demonstrating efficiency can emerge from non-optimization processes like preferential attachment.

Findings

All studied languages exhibit topological efficiency above chance.

The pattern is consistent across linguistic families and modalities.

Efficiency can arise from non-optimization mechanisms such as preferential attachment.

Abstract

Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their topologies. This study investigates how the topologies of syntactic graphs reveal traces of the processes that led to their emergence. I report a new universal regularity in syntactic structures: Their topology is communicatively efficient above chance. The pattern holds, without exception, for all 124 languages studied, across linguistic families and modalities (spoken, written, and signed). This pattern can arise from a process optimizing for communicative efficiency or, alternatively, by construction, as a by-effect of a sublinear preferential attachment process reflecting language production mechanisms known from psycholinguistics. This dual explanation shows how communicative efficiency, per se, does not require optimization. Among the two options, efficiency without optimization offers the better explanation for the new pattern.