How tight is your language? A semantic typology based on Mutual Information
Natalia Levshina · 2020
Languages differ in the degree of semantic flexibility of their syntactic roles.For example, English and Indonesian are considered more flexible with regard to the semantics of subjects, whereas German and Japanese are less flexible.In Hawkins' classification, more flexible languages are said to have a loose fit, and less flexible ones are those that have a tight fit.This classification has been based on manual inspection of example sentences.The present paper proposes a new, quantitative approach to deriving the measures of looseness and tightness from corpora.We use corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora Collection in thirty typologically and genealogically diverse languages and parse them syntactically with the help of the Universal Dependencies annotation software.Next, we compute Mutual Information scores for each language using the matrices of lexical lemmas and four syntactic dependencies (intransitive subjects, transitive subject, objects and obliques).The new approach allows us not only to reproduce the results of previous investigations, but also to extend the typology to new languages.We also demonstrate that verb-final languages tend to have a tighter relationship between lexemes and syntactic roles, which helps language users to recognize thematic roles early during comprehension. Theoretical background and aims of the paperThis paper proposes a quantitative bottom-up corpus-based approach to cross-linguistic comparison, determining how tightly or loosely different lexemes can be mapped on basic syntactic roles.The idea goes back to Hawkins (1986Hawkins ( : 121-127, 1995; see also Müller-Gotama 1994), who coined the terms 'tight-fit' and 'loose-fit' languages.The former have unique surface forms that map onto more constrained meanings, whereas the latter have more vague forms with less constrained meanings.For instance, Present-Day English has fewer semantic restrictions on the subject and object than Old English, German or Russian.Consider several examples below.(1) a.Locative: This tent sleeps four.b.Temporal: 2020 witnessed a spread of the highly infectious coronavirus disease.c.Instrument: 10 Euros will buy you a meal.d.