Divergence from Syntax to Linear Order in Ancient Greek Lexical Networks

All natural languages allegedly tend to minimize the length (and thus, the number of crossings) of syntactic dependencies by arranging words into an adequate linear order. Focusing on Ancient Greek as a case of study, this paper demonstrates that this tendency is far from constant. The method consists in inducing a pair of networks from a text representing a given diachronic variety, using lemmas as nodes and word relations (either syntactic dependency or linear adjacency) as arcs. Although the pair members share some topological properties (such as small-world effect, scale-freeness and disassortative mixing), they also diverge in some respects. By comparing the divergence in the Classic variety with that of the Late variety through Spectrum Analysis, a change is observed. This phenomenon may lead to rethinking how the cognitive complexity of language is measured and whether it is equivalent for different (varieties of) languages. In particular, this paper proposes the existence of a trade-off between dependency length minimization and pragmatic principles.