Two new papers explore the principle of swap distance minimization as a factor shaping word order in human languages. The research suggests that variations in subject, object, and verb order, even in languages without a dominant SOV or SVO structure, can be explained by this principle. One paper introduces a mathematical framework to measure the optimality of word order and gesture order, finding crosslinguistic gestures to be at least 77% optimal. AI
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IMPACT Introduces a novel mathematical framework for analyzing linguistic structures, potentially influencing future NLP research.
RANK_REASON Two academic papers published on arXiv introduce a new linguistic theory.