5 papers
Ease of dependency distance minimization in star-like structures
Emília Garcia-Casademont, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a tree where edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. When that structure is a star, it has been demonstrate…
Swap distance minimization shapes the order of subject, object and verb in languages of the world
Jairo Rios-El-Yazidi, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho
Languages of the world vary concerning the order of subject (S), object (O) and verb (V). The most frequent dominant orders are SOV and SVO, and researchers have tailored models to…
How to measure the optimality of word or gesture order with respect to the principle of swap distance minimization
Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho
The structure of all the permutations of a sequence can be represented as a permutohedron, a graph where vertices are permutations and two vertices are linked if a swap of adjacent…
Swap distance minimization beyond entropy minimization in word order variation
Víctor Franco-Sánchez, Arnau Martí-Llobet, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho
Consider a linguistic structure formed by elements, for instance, subject, direct object and verb () or subject, direct object, indirect object and verb (). We invest…
Swap distance minimization in SOV languages. Cognitive and mathematical foundations
Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Savithry Namboodiripad
Distance minimization is a general principle of language. A special case of this principle in the domain of word order is swap distance minimization. This principle predicts that v…