Word-Order Analysis Based Upon Treebank Data

The paper describes an experiment consisting in the attempt to quantify word-order properties of three Indo-European languages (Czech, English and Farsi). The investigation is driven by the endeavor to find an objective way how to compare natural languages from the point of view of the degree of their word-order freedom. Unlike similar studies which concentrate either on purely linguistic or purely statistical approach, our experiment tries to combine both – the observations are verified against large samples of sentences from available treebanks, and, at the same time, we exploit the ability of our tools to analyze selected important phenomena (as, e.g., the differences of the word order of a main and a subordinate clause) more deeply. The quantitative results of our research are collected from the syntactically annotated treebanks available for all three languages. Thanks to the HamleDT project, it is possible to search all treebanks in a uniform way by means of a universal query tool PML-TQ. This is also a secondary goal of this paper – to demonstrate the research potential provided by language resources which are to a certain extent unified.