Long English objects and short Chinese objects

Language diversity shaped by cognitive universality

Bibliographic Data

ID21226562
AuthorsChunshan Xu (0000-0001-7637-7814, Anhui Jianzhu University), Haitao Liu (0000-0003-1724-4418, Fudan University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume11
Issue1
Pages609-619
Publication date2025-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics Vanguard (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2199-174X • E-ISSN: 2199-174X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/lingvan-2023-0132
OpenAlexW4408083019
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited33

Based on samples from two corpora, we found that Chinese objects tend to be much shorter than English objects, and that unlike in English, Chinese subjects and objects tend to have similar lengths when their information status is controlled. These differences can be explained in terms of a universal need for dependency distance minimization (DDM), reflecting different strategies of sentence organization to meet the universal constraint of working memory. These DDM-driven syntactic diversities may be irrelevant to grammaticality, but contribute to the smoothness of sentences, because they are shaped by the universal need to reduce the cognitive burden during comprehension. It is perhaps in these common cognitive and functional constraints that we are to find true language universals, universals embodied in linguistic diversity

Cognition · Cognitive linguistics · Cognitive psychology · Comprehension · Embodied cognition · Grammar · Grammaticality · Linguistic universal · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Problem of universals · Sentence · Sociology · Theoretical linguistics · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence

Tools

Open DOI