A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order
Table 1: NP orders and their adjusted frequencies across languages and their counts across genera, as given in Dryer (in prep).
['Order', 'Adjusted frequency', 'Genera count']
July 15, 2020 A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the variation in the order of elements inside the noun phrase (NP) across languages. In particular, much work has focused on predicting the relative frequencies across languages of orders of the elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun}. In this table, D stands for demonstrative, N stands for numeral, A stands for adjective, and n stands for noun. Genera counts are the counts of linguistic genera showing a certain order; adjusted frequencies are calculated using a methodology described in Dryer (in prep) intended to minimize any overrepresentation of some orders that may arise from areal effects. Here we consider three proposals from the literature on how to explain these frequencies. We apply Poisson regression to predict two quantities. (We round the adjusted frequencies to the nearest integer in order to satisfy the Poisson regression assumption that the dependent variable is a natural number.) Second, we try to predict the counts of genera given in the same paper.