A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order

Abstract While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and flexibility, their orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort identify these pressures, prior work has compared real counterfactual orders. Yet one pressure been overlooked such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a for UID may have influenced patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, use computational models test lead greater uniformity than our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, find that: (i) among SVO consistently reverse orders, (ii) only linguistically implausible exceed These findings are compatible with development usage languages.1