Abstract
A series of analyses of linguistic corpora of L1 acquisition of different languages (Catalan, Basque, Dutch, Italian, German, French, Spanish and English) showed that functional words emerge as hubs of the network. Such emergence always takes place late and abruptly, in coincidence with that of a new topology of the network: the small-world network. This kind of network is the middle stage between completely random and completely regular networks. In earlier analyses, determiners stood out among functional words as hubs in all languages, regardless of their linguistic phylogeny. But there are two different ways to analyze the syntactic relationship between determiners and nouns: determiners could either be “governors” or “dependents” of nouns. Here we explore the two possible analyses and argue that the first one should be preferred over the second one, in line with contemporary syntactic theorizing.
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Notes
- 1.
We would like to note that the term «word » is highly ambiguous and therefore not really suitable as a term for a unit. The boundaries of «words» can vary dramatically from one language to another (e.g., Catalan vs. Basque , or Frisian vs. West Greenlandic ) and from one module to the other (cf. words in morphology vs. in phonology ).
- 2.
The term c-network is used in order to make clear the radical difference between the networks with which we work here and other networks used in cognitive science such as Neural Networks or Connectionism . Complex networks have no relation whatsoever with the networks developed by connectionists, the word «network » being the only point in common.
- 3.
A word is said to be a phonological neighbor of a target word if the substitution, addition or deletion of a single phoneme in any position in that word converts it to the target word .
- 4.
“OM” stands for “Object Agreement Marker” and “SM” for “Subject Agreement Marker”.
- 5.
An example typically used to illustrate C is, thinking in nodes as people and edges as friendship relationships, “how many of my friends are also friends of each other?”.
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Acknowledgements
This research benefited from the following grants: EC FP7/SSH-2013-1 AThEME 613465 (European Commission), IT769-13 (Eusko Jaurlaritza), TIN2016-80347-R (MICINN), FFI2016-78034-C2-2-P and FEDER, FFI2017-87140-C4-1-P, FFI2014-53675-P (MINECO).
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Barceló-Coblijn, L., Duguine, M., Irurtzun, A. (2019). The Emergence of Hubs in Complex Syntactic Networks and the DP Hypothesis: The Relevance of a Linguistic Analysis. In: Massip-Bonet, À., Bel-Enguix, G., Bastardas-Boada, A. (eds) Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04598-2_15
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