At the Institute of Linguistics, Dr. Sidharth Ranjan has taken on a topic that becomes more exciting the longer you think about it: How are sentences formed in the course of communication, and how are the orders of words determined in the sentence? How do speakers make these linguistic decisions? Dr. Ranjan investigated these questions based on the Hindi language and provided answers.
Hindi is a verb-final language with Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) as the most frequent order, but it also shows high flexibility in word ordering. However, certain word orders are consistently preferred over others. An important question resulting from this is: What strategies do speakers use to select a certain word sequence? Building on the old-age dependency length minimization principle, which seeks to keep syntactically-related words as closely as possible within a sentence, and ideas from behavioural economics, Dr. Ranjan's novel computer analysis of a large text database revealed that speakers use 'quick-yet-economical' heuristics. These heuristics keep dependencies short but at the same time are easy to use.
Read more about his work here:
Ranjan, S., & von der Malsburg, T. (2023). A bounded rationality account of dependency length minimization in Hindi. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85q7x1nd
The complete notification by the University of Stuttgart: https://www.uni-stuttgart.de/en/university/news/all/research-day-2024/
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