MIT claims to have found a “language universal” that ties all languages together

Yes, I also think dependency length minimization is just a cognitive constraint. (Lead author here.) The idea of calling this a universal in the Chomsky sense is all from the press. The cool thing about it is that (previous work has shown) you can use this constraint in principle to derive a lot of the more substantive "universals" (really, overwhelming tendencies) of language, such as that natural language expressions are usually well-nested, and that in languages where the verb follows the object, the noun also follows the adjective, and the preposition follows the noun, etc.

As for isolated languages, I just finished performing some dependency length preference experiments on indigenous people in Bolivia, but haven't analyzed the data yet, so we'll see :)

Glad this is top comment atm, and thanks for saying it. Pop/folk linguistics is too easy and super annoying.

This is a bad article and it misrepresents the notion of a 'universal' in any sense (Chomsky, Greenberg, you name it) but the most purely functional. Things like sentence/word length being bounded by memory or cognitive capacity or whatever aren't a 'universal' in any meaningful or useful sense, and no linguist would argue otherwise. Probably.

Finding something universal (and non-trivial) to human languages would still be exciting.

I don't think you understand what the universal grammar is, if you're discounting DLM as merely being "likely based on human constraints," because that's the whole hypothesis of the universal grammar. It posits that there are physical limitations in the brain that force certain structures on language, as opposed to language being completely free form.

Does anyone have a list of the 37 languages used?

There's a reasonably well-supported taxonomy of languages, so sample size sufficiency is for experts only.

Lead author here. It's true that longer sentences will have longer dependency length on average. That was one of the big methodological problems with previous papers that tried to show this. In the paper, we deal with this by doing stats on dependency length growth rate as sentences get longer, rather than averaging dependency lengths from sentences of different length.

I'm sure that among the 7000 languages of the world there are some that don't minimize dependency length. But I'd be content showing it's an overwhelming tendency rather than a true "universal"!

It’s probably more memetics (constrained by cognitive load) than genetics that select the features of languages, and there are likely many other factors that determine the complexity of languages and grammatical structures: For example, there is a sweet spot between minimal symbol count and minimal lengths of the words. In the extremes you have either short words but many symbols, or few symbols but long words. At the same time the number of distinguishable phonemes and therefore symbols are, of course, restricted by the sounds that are producible by the average vocal tract.

Secondly, the communication channels thought→vocalization→hearing→thought or even thought→typing→reading→thought are inherently very noisy, so you end up with a lot of redundancy, like particles, introduction and transition phrases.

And lastly, I think that there are always some words and phases that are not shaped by efficiency/cognitive load, but rather by whether it is fun or fashionable to talk in a certain way. There is certainly some cultural variance that can be orthogonal to efficiency.

Especially because they admit themselves that two of the languages in their set don’t even minimize.

Even with short sentences, German and Japanese often have large DLM values.

With more complex, nested sentences (which are really common in Germany), this becomes more of an issue, because between two connected words you can have 7 subclauses.

(Seriously, read Karl Marx’ Das Kapital, or Günther Grass’ Der Krebsgang, or read any other German author.)

Here you go: http://web.mit.edu/futrell/www/papers/futrell2015largescale....

They used sentence dependency graphs - in this sentence "John", "trash" and "out" are dependencies of "threw". There's a few variants, but the graph construction rules are standardised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar

Specifically, we used hand-parsed corpora developed by Google and a whole bunch of computational linguists over the last 15 years.

The dependency representation is of course an incomplete picture of how words hang together in a sentence. But it's the only format that's flexible enough that you could dream of parsing 37 languages to (approximately) the same standard.

I read it hoping to make a Lisp/Esperanto joke but alas, they only found one universal aspect of all languages, they did not find a universal language. The universal tendency is to bundle words together:

> You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier to understand: “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen,” or “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.”

Interestingly the human brain blocks any line starting with

    (fhtagn

Actually, I think Lisp has a pretty high average DLM compared to natural languages, which partly explains why some people have so much trouble with it. You can, by just dropping in a pair of parens, arbitrarily separate concepts from one another in a Lisp sentence. In fact, one primary complaint when reading Lisp is trying to pair up closing parens with their opening partners. Do if this research shows anything, it's that Lisp could never have developed as a human language naturally.

.. So I guess it really must have been ordained by the gods, after all, then.

It's "Chomsky" of course, but I _really_ like "Chompsky"!

I think the title isn't overstated but awkward in a way that we're all translating it into an overstatement.

Between the quotes and not knowing what a language universal was I assumed they meant a universal language, apparently I'm not alone in this. The authors might write paper on this phenomenon next!

NLTK is nice but if you want to work with nontrivial amounts of data it's better to turn to Stanford's NLP tools, or Spacy.

No, the implications are actually quite small. This article is a very bad pop-science summary of relatively banal linguistic research.

Linguists have studied linguistic universals for a long time, which are properties that all human languages have. For example, one could try to imagine (in the style of Borges) a language which had no nouns, and in which all sentences are formed of relationships between verbs—but no natural language has this feature: all natural languages have nouns and verbs.

There are also implicational universals, which are of the form, if [some language] has property X, then it will also have property Y, and tendencies, which are broad driving trends that might have individual exceptions. An example of the latter is that languages that place the verb at the end of the sentence usually have postpositions rather than prepositions, but this has exceptions (e.g., Latin.)

What's being studied here is a tendency in sentence structure: languages usually structure their syntax such that they can minimize the dependency length, or the distance between syntactically releated words in a sentence. This has long been hypothesized, but this paper gives evidence for it in the form of a large cross-language survey. Which is cool! But by no means does it have major implications for CS in any way. (At least, no more than any of the copious previous research on linguistic universals.)

EDIT: I should also add that this area of research is not new. In fact, linguist Joseph Greenberg published an article called 'Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements' in 1963. This is continuing research and, while good research, not particularly groundbreaking or pioneering.

No, not really. They did not look at enough languages for this to be anything except a starting point for additional research.

As it is you can not draw any conclusions from this.

Why don't you tell us what the implications for CS are?

nah, the implications are mostly biological. The discovery itself only implies that the language module in our brains are bounded by identical rules across all people. Therefore the discovery leads only to greater insight toward an existing biological system rather then a fundamental theoretical property of language.

As a result, the implications aren't as closely intertwined with CS.

What implications for CS? Even the implications for the study of natural languages are not that great (and oversold by the article).