Vortrag: Using information theory to explain language change

The order of Finnish adpositions through the lenses of Dependency Length Minimization Theory and diachronic typology

Abstract

Whether a language uses prepositions or postpositions correlates with whether it uses Verb-Object (VO) or Object-Verb (OV) word order. Proto-Uralic is a typical OV language. Finnish, which descends from Proto-Uralic, is typologically unusual in that it generally uses VO order and postpositions. It also features bipositions, i.e. adpositions that can appear in either position. In my presentation, I will discuss historical word order change from the perspective of Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) Theory and diachronic typology. Then I will very briefly present my analysis of a Finnish dependency corpus and show that (1) only using prepositions would make Finnish more efficient according to DLM theory, and that (2) bipositions are mostly used as prepositions when it is efficient to do so. I hypothesize that Finnish favors postpositions due to specific grammaticalization processes but is undergoing change toward a more preposition-heavy system.

I will present the results of my bachelor's thesis. I am generally interested in applying methods from computational linguistics to typology and historical linguistics. Finnish adpositions are fascinatingly complex and offer a great opportunity to study whether thinking of dependency relations in terms of efficiency is useful in the study of language change.

Info

Tag: 11.05.2024
Anfangszeit: 16:00
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: Turtle (33.2.106)
Track: Computational Linguistics
Sprache: en

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