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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 511–531

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Chapter 25
Cartography, movement and reordering of arguments

A quantitative computational study

 | Beijing Language and Culture University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.25sam
Abstract
Cartographic maps aim to identify the order of generation and understand, by explaining in terms of syntactic strategies, the derived orders. In this work, we focus on the order of core verbal arguments and how the PP-NP order is derived from a basic NP-PP order. We test three models of syntactic operations (criterial model, meaningless movement, and external merge) and their predictions using quantitative and computational tools. Specifically, we implement two studies across nineteen treebanks in sixteen languages (four treebanks for Italian and Hebrew in Study 1; fifteen parallel treebanks in Study 2) to test the predictions in terms of locality for the different models. Our results show that the criterial model better predicts the data.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Locality
    • 2.2Movements and locality
    • 2.3Quantifying the hypotheses
  • 3.Study 1: Hebrew and Italian
    • 3.1Materials & methods
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Study 2: Parallel treebanks
    • 4.1Materials & methods
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (64)
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