A Statistical Comparison of Some Theories of NP Word Order

Abstract

A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun} in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson regression to statistically compare some prominent accounts of this variation. We compare feature systems derived from Cinque (2005) to feature systems given in Cysouw (2010) and Dryer (in prep). In this setting, we do not find clear reasons to prefer the model of Cinque (2005) or Dryer (in prep), but we find both of these models have substantially better fit to the typological data than the model from Cysouw (2010).