Linguistics Vanguard· 2026Q1
Multilevel phylogenetic inference of syntactic harmony in Indo-European
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- 2026year
Short summary
Phylogenetic analysis of 58 Indo-European corpora reveals that while evolutionary trends favor syntactic harmony, these trends are largely consistent with random ordering and show a weaker bias than expected from a single word-order parameter.
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Key points
- Phylogenetic inference was applied to 58 Indo-European dependency-annotated corpora to study syntactic harmony evolution.
- Observed evolutionary trends favor harmony but are largely consistent with random ordering baselines.
- Harmonic bias is weaker than expected under a single parameter model for word order.
- Findings provide limited support for functional explanations of syntactic harmony in language use.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract One of the most well-established typological universals is that languages tend to order the grammatical head and its dependents consistently. This harmonic principle has been attributed to cognitive benefits that facilitate language processing and learning efficiency. However, there is little corpus-based research disentangling the evolutionary processes that shape the crosslinguistic distribution of harmony. Using 58 dependency-annotated corpora and Bayesian multilevel phylogenetic inference, this study investigates the evolutionary biases towards harmony against principled baselines in the history of Indo-European. While the observed evolutionary trends favor harmony over disharmony, they are largely consistent with those expected under a random baseline that generates orders independently for each dependency type. At the same time, the observed trends show a much weaker harmonic bias than expected under a baseline that assumes a single head-dependent parameter governing word order patterns. Overall, these findings provide limited support for functional explanations of syntactic harmony in language use, while suggesting that distinct processes may play a role in shaping structural diversity and language evolution.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Linguistics Vanguard, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Language and Linguistics
Language and LinguisticsArts and Humanities