Why verb-initial languages are not frequent

André Grüning

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Submission date: 07. Feb. 2003
Pages: 10
published in: 9th International Summer School in Cognitive Science
Sofia : New Bulgarian University, 2002. - P. 1 - 4
Bibtex
with the following different title: Why verb-initial languages are not so frequent
Keywords and phrases: basic word order, connectionism, neural networks, entropy, finite state automata
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Abstract:
In our simulations with simple recurrent networks we demonstrate that small artificial languages are learnt worse or better depending on their basic word order. We show that verb-initial languages are difficult to learn, reflecting the lower frequency of verb-initial natural languages.

We try to go beyond mere simulations proposing two objective mathematical measures to explain our results.