New Proposal of Greenberg’s Universal 14 from Typometrics

Antoni Brosa-Rodríguez, Sylvain Kahane

Abstract
In his Universal 14, Greenberg stated that the normal and dominant order in all world languages was to place the condition before the conclusion in conditional sentences. We take this claim to review it quantitatively and based on occurrences in real texts in more than 50 languages. We can see that Greenberg’s proposal is correct but that it needs a reformulation to be true at all. We propose a quantitatively based and updated Universal 14, which gives a better account of the representation of the different languages analyzed and which is fulfilled in 100% of the cases (as opposed to Greenberg’s 60% in our sample). In addition, we also analyze adverbial sentences. Once we obtain the occurrence data in their direction (before or after the main verb), we plot a new Universal in a typometrical way: 100% of the languages show a higher proportion of preceding conditional clauses than of adverbial clauses, regardless of their type or the direction preference for adverbial clauses. The relationship between the SOV type and a stricter initial conditional location is also proposed.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1069
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12217–12226
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1069
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antoni Brosa-Rodríguez and Sylvain Kahane. 2024. New Proposal of Greenberg’s Universal 14 from Typometrics. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12217–12226, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
New Proposal of Greenberg’s Universal 14 from Typometrics (Brosa-Rodríguez & Kahane, LREC-COLING 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.1069.pdf
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