Dependency Length Minimization and Lexical Frequency in Prepositional Phrase Ordering in English

Previous research has shown cross-linguistically that the human language parser prefers constituent orders that minimize the distance between syntactic heads and their dependents, but the interaction between dependency length minimization (DLM) and other factors governing linear word ordering is still unknown. We examine the effects of DLM, lexical frequency, and the traditional rule of Manner before Place before Time (MPT) in ordering of prepositional phrase (PP) adjuncts in English using corpora in different language genres annotated with syntactic structure. While MPT and DLM were consistently predictive of PP ordering in our analysis, lexical frequency information was sensitive to language genre