Syntactic Structures and Code Parameters
This work addresses the problem of modeling language evolution and syntactic structure for linguists and computational researchers, but it appears incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study assigned error-correcting codes to syntactic structures of world languages and found that many codes exceed established bounds like Gilbert-Varshamov, with analysis showing that spin glass models of language change can sometimes improve these codes.
We assign binary and ternary error-correcting codes to the data of syntactic structures of world languages and we study the distribution of code points in the space of code parameters. We show that, while most codes populate the lower region approximating a superposition of Thomae functions, there is a substantial presence of codes above the Gilbert-Varshamov bound and even above the asymptotic bound and the Plotkin bound. We investigate the dynamics induced on the space of code parameters by spin glass models of language change, and show that, in the presence of entailment relations between syntactic parameters the dynamics can sometimes improve the code. For large sets of languages and syntactic data, one can gain information on the spin glass dynamics from the induced dynamics in the space of code parameters.