Diachronic Trends in Word Order Freedom and Dependency Length in Dependency-Annotated Corpora of Latin and Ancient Greek
Kristina Gulordava, Paola Merlo · 2015
One easily observable aspect of language variation is the order of words. In human and machine natural language processing, it is often claimed that parsing freeorder languages is more difficult than parsing fixed-order languages. In this study on Latin and Ancient Greek, two wellknown and well-documented free-order languages, we propose syntactic correlates of word order freedom. We apply our indicators to a collection of dependencyannotated texts of different time periods. On the one hand, we confirm a trend towards more fixed-order patterns in time. On the other hand, we show that a dependency-based measure of the flexibility of word order is correlated with the parsing performance on these languages.