Conference article

Understanding Constraints on Non-projectivity Using Novel Measures

Himanshu Yadav
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Center for Linguistics, New Delhi, India

Ashwini Vaidya
IIT Delhi, Department of Electrical Engineering, India

Samar Husain
IIT Delhi, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, India

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Published in: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017), September 18-20, 2017, Università di Pisa, Italy

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 139:31, p. 276-286

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Published: 2017-09-13

ISBN: 978-91-7685-467-9

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

In this work we propose certain novel measures to understand non-projectivity in various syntactic phenomena in Hindi. This is an attempt to go beyond the analysis of non-projectivity in terms of certain graphical measures such as edge degree, planarity etc. Our measures are motivated by the findings in the processing literature that have investigated the interaction between working-memory constraints and syntactic complexity. Our analysis shows that the measures pat-tern differently for distinct phenomena and therefore could prove to be beneficial in understanding non-projectivity in a language. We also find some interesting differences in non-projectivity between conversation and news genre.

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