Word boundaries and the morphology-syntax trade-off
Authors: Pablo Mosteiro, Damian E Blasi


Reviewer paper summaries: The paper proposes to investigate the relation between morphology and syntax in a corpus-based perspective, by relying on a manipulation of book texts from the Bible in different languages -- with data taken from the Parallel Bible Corpus (Mayer & Cysouw 2014).
Summary of strengths: The proposed approach seems to successfully apply to a wide range of languages.
Summary of weaknesses: However, I cannot find detailed results -- with three simple histograms based on rho-values only.
The major point of weakness is that the relation between syntax and morphology in natural languages is defined in a too simplified way, and that it is not clearly defined which is the contribution of the paper to the advancement of knowledge, and in which domain in particular.
Comments, suggestions and typos: In the Introduction the author(s) define(s) the syntactic level as those where words are combined in sentences, and morphology as the processes that hold within words. And what about languages with cases (e.g. classic latin, or German)?
At the end of the Introduction, 2 research questions are defined: how information is distributed across syntax and morphology at the word boundaries level, and if there is an optimization of information conveyed by syntax and morphology.
But how these research questions impact on natural languages and nl usage? or what about the human knowledge and mental representations?
In section 5, which is the sense of the statement that more information is encoded in the word order -- and less in the word structure -- when splitting words in their sub-parts? And how did you define subparts? As morphemes or? 
My overall suggestion is to better define the claim and the contribution of the research you are presenting here.
Overall assessment scores: 2.5