A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order
This work addresses a specific problem in linguistic typology for researchers studying language variation, but it is incremental as it compares existing theories without introducing new methods or paradigms.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting the relative frequencies of noun phrase element orders across languages by statistically comparing prominent linguistic theories using Poisson regression. The result showed that models from Cinque (2005) and Dryer (in prep) had substantially better fit to typological data than the model from Cysouw (2010), with no clear preference between the former two.
A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun} in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson regression to statistically compare some prominent accounts of this variation. We compare feature systems derived from Cinque (2005) to feature systems given in Cysouw (2010) and Dryer (in prep). In this setting, we do not find clear reasons to prefer the model of Cinque (2005) or Dryer (in prep), but we find both of these models have substantially better fit to the typological data than the model from Cysouw (2010).