Word Order, Marking, and Parts-of-Speech Systems
Relja Vulanović, Reinhard Köhler · Journal of Quantitative Linguistics · 2009
Parts-of-speech systems, as defined by Hengeveld et al. in their 2004 article on parts-of-speech systems and word order, form the framework for this article, in which we investigate how the distribution of languages with respect to certain linguistic features is related to the number of propositional functions and the number of lexeme classes. The linguistic features are the presence or absence of fixed word order and markers, which may disambiguate between different propositional functions. We show that the relation can be modelled by a three-dimensional generalization of the sigmoid, for which we provide theoretical justification.