@inproceedings{kahane-etal-2023-word,
    title = "Word order flexibility: a typometric study",
    author = "Kahane, Sylvain  and
      Peng, Ziqian  and
      Gerdes, Kim",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Lareau, Fran{\c{c}}ois",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Washington, D.C.",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2023.depling-1.7/",
    pages = "68--80",
    abstract = "This paper introduces a typometric measure of flexibility, which quantifies the variability of head-dependent word order on the whole set of treebanks of a language or on specific constructions. The measure is based on the notion of head-initiality and we show that it can be computed for all of languages of the Universal Dependency treebank set, that it does not require ad-hoc thresholds to categorize languages or constructions, and that it can be applied with any granularity of constructions and languages. We compare our results with Bakker{'}s (1998) categorical flexibility index. Typometric flexibility is shown to be a good measure for characterizing the language distribution with respect to word order for a given construction, and for estimating whether a construction predicts the global word order behavior of a language."
}