Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences

arXiv:2402.11549v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key indicator of language processing difficulty and working memory load. The current paper looks at diachronic trends in syntactic language change in both English and German, using corpora of parliamentary debates from the last c. 160 years. We base our observations on five …

abstract arxiv change communication complexity cs.ai cs.cl current efficiency english german human key language language processing languages linear memory metrics processing studies type words