{"pk":25600,"title":"Word order in a grammarless language: A ‘small-data’ information-theoretic\napproach","subtitle":null,"abstract":"David Gil has argued that Riau Indonesian (Sumatra.\nIndonesia) has no syntax, or at least not much. This\ncontroversial analysis undermines all current models of\ngrammar, especially those describing acquisition and on-line\nprocessing. To test the strength of this analysis, we computed\nthe information gain holding between unigram and bigram\nmodels of regular and randomized samples of English and\nRiau Indonesian. English samples were included as a\nrelatively syntax-heavy baseline. We then correlated\ninformation gain values with language (English vs. Riau\nIndonesian), text type (original vs. randomized), and their\ninteraction within a linear mixed-effects regression. The\nresults suggest (a) that English and Riau Indonesian have the\nsame amount of bigram informativity and (b) that\nrandomization eliminates this effect in both languages. These\nfindings do not support Gil’s syntax-free analysis; rather, they\npoint to some kind of productive constraints on Riau\nIndonesian word order","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Indonesian; word classes; n-gram models;\ninformation gain; entropy"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x10c3nj","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Nicholas","middle_name":"A","last_name":"Lester","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCSB","department":""},{"first_name":"Fermin","middle_name":"Moscoso","last_name":"del Prado","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCSB","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25600/galley/15224/download/"}]}