Quantitative typological analysis of Romance languages

• Authors: Haitao Liu , Chunshan Xu
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Based on real-text corpora with syntactic annotation, this study quantitatively addressed the following two questions: whether quantitative methods and indexes can point to the diachronic syntactic drifts characterizing the evolution from Latin to Romance languages and whether these methods and indexes can provide evidence to evince the shared syntactic features among Romance languages and define them as a distinctive language subgroup. Our study shows that the distributions of dependency directions are suggestive of positive answers to the above two questions. In addition, the dependency syntactic networks extracted from the dependency treebanks reflect the degree of inflectional variation of a language, and the clustering analysis shows that these parameters, in spite of some imperfections, can also help differentiate Romance languages from Latin diachronically and from other languages synchronically.

Keywords

EN

Romance languages; quantitative analysis; dependency syntax; complex network; typology

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 48
• Pages: 597-625

Dates

published

2012

received

2012-01-20

revised

2012-08-01

accepted

2012-08-05

Contributors

author

Haitao Liu

• Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

author

Chunshan Xu

• Communication University of China, Beijing, China

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2012-0027