Dependency direction as a means of word-order typology: A method based on dependency treebanks

Word-order typology often uses the linear order of binary grammatical pairs in sentences to classify a language. The present paper proposes a method based on dependency treebanks as a typological means. This paper investigates 20 languages using treebanks with different sizes from 16 K to 1 million dependencies. The results show that some languages are more head-initial or head-final than others, but all contain head-initial and head-final elements. The 20 languages can be arranged on a continuum with complete head-initial and head-final patterns as the two ends. Some data about subject–verb, object–verb and adjective–noun are extracted from the treebanks for comparison with the typological studies based on the traditional means, the results are similar. The investigation demonstrates that the proposedmethod is valid for positioning a language in the typological continuum and the resources from computational linguistics can also be used in language typology. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 According to Lehmann (2005) and Tesnière (1959:32), Schmidt (1926) was the first to use the basic components of the sentence and their interrelationships as a pointer to language typology.