Re: VMs: evidence that words are not independent of each other.

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Nick Pelling wrote:
> it's a good question as to why "ar al" should be 3.5x more frequent than
> "al ar".

I don't know the statistics of this in typical natural languages, but
certainly in most languages word order is fairly fixed, at least locally.
Prepositions precede nouns, etc., fixed sequences like "out of" don't get
reversed, and so on.  So, if VMs words map, even indirectly, to a system
of underlying words, then we would expect them to exhibit ordering.

If they map instead to underlying letters, the same is true, because words
are not random strings of sounds, but are structured by the morphosyntax
of the language, its syllable structure, and so on.  One outgrowth of this
is that it is usually possible to specify the canonical structure of words
and syllables in a language.  Of course, this is usually done in
phonological terms, not orthographic ones, and some of our candidate
languages have significant disconnects between their phonology and their
standard orthography.


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