What Determines the Order of Verbal Dependents in Hindi? Effects of Efficiency in Comprehension and Production

Kartik Sharma, Richard Futrell, Samar Husain


Abstract
Word order flexibility is one of the distinctive features of SOV languages. In this work, we investigate whether the order and relative distance of preverbal dependents in Hindi, an SOV language, is affected by factors motivated by efficiency considerations during comprehension/production. We investigate the influence of Head–Dependent Mutual Information (HDMI), similarity-based interference, accessibility and case-marking. Results show that preverbal dependents remain close to the verbal head when the HDMI between the verb and its dependent is high. This demonstrates the influence of locality constraints on dependency distance and word order in an SOV language. Additionally, dependency distance were found to be longer when the dependent was animate, when it was case-marked and when it was semantically similar to other preverbal dependents. Together the results highlight the crosslinguistic generalizability of these factors and provide evidence for a functionally motivated account of word order in SOV languages such as Hindi.
Anthology ID:
2020.cmcl-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Emmanuele Chersoni, Cassandra Jacobs, Yohei Oseki, Laurent Prévot, Enrico Santus
Venue:
CMCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–10
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.cmcl-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.cmcl-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kartik Sharma, Richard Futrell, and Samar Husain. 2020. What Determines the Order of Verbal Dependents in Hindi? Effects of Efficiency in Comprehension and Production. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 1–10, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What Determines the Order of Verbal Dependents in Hindi? Effects of Efficiency in Comprehension and Production (Sharma et al., CMCL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.cmcl-1.1.pdf