Studio sull'ordine dei costituenti nel confronto tra generi e complessità
Authors: Giulia Pieri, Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell'Orletta (Università di Pisa, Emm&mmE Informatica, CNR-ILC, 2016)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
In this article we present a study on the order of constituents in Italian based on body noted automatically up to syntactic analysis dependent.\ The comparative survey has allowed to evaluate the influence of both textual genre and linguistic complexity in the distribution of syntactic branding phenomena.

Introduction
Although there is no universally valid metric with which languages can be classified according to a scale of AUTHOR complexity, there are some indicators that, at different linguistic levels, can be assumed as indices of complexity "universally' valid AUTHOR. On the syntactic level, one of them is represented by the order of the constituents, so the languages that admit a free order are considered more complex than those with a fixed order. In linguistic and psycholinguistic literature, the flexibility of order is, in turn, brought back to different factors that take into account, on the one hand, the semantic and pragmatic principles determined by the structure of the AUTHOR information, on the other hand the constraints of performances, so the unmarked structures are those cognitively less expensive that allow the speaker to process the information faster AUTHOR. By comparatively examining two treebanks of Latin and ancient Greek, AUTHOR's study showed that the flexibility of the syntactic order, measured as the distance between the actual length of the dependencies of a sentence and its optimal AUTHOR length, is an element of complexity that can be deduced both from the lower precision of the automatic parsing in the analysis of these languages, and from the tendency that is found over time towards fixed order patterns of constituents. This article proposes a quantitative study for Italian, VO type (or initial head) and relatively unflexible, aimed at investigating whether, and to what extent, the natural or unmarked disposition of constituents in the sentence is influenced by the textual genre and the complexity of the language used in the text. To this end, two linguistic, narrative and journalistic genres have been compared, in turn distinguished in two different linguistic varieties by degree of complexity, where this degree is defined in relation to the reference reader. Unlike the traditional corpus--based analysis of the order of constituents in Italian, all the data discussed here are derived from an automatic body annotated up to the level of syntactic analysis dependent on them.\ Although the reconstruction of the syntactic structure by a statistical parser is inevitably subject to some AUTHOR errors, which increase for the texts of a domain distant from that of the AUTHOR training, the variety of phenomena that can be monitored with reliability starting from an automatic linguistic analysis is very wide and complex.\ The linguistic--computational perspective opens up promising research perspectives for the construction and validation on a large scale of theoretical models on the functioning of linguistic systems both in a typological key and compared to the traditional axes of linguistic variation. The following will be presented first the corporations used in this study and then the monitoring methodology on which the extraction of the linguistic characteristics under investigation was based (paragraph sec:preprocessing); in paragraph sec: analysis we will discuss the main results obtained and finally draw some conclusions of this research.

Conclusion
This article proposed a comparative study on a particular phenomenon related to syntactic complexity, that is the order of constituents in Italian. The comparison was conducted on two levels: gender variation and degree of complexity. %: The objective was to verify which systems of constituents depend on the textual genre, such as the simplification process, and which by both. As regards the first, it has been possible to note that the journalistic texts are those that most adhere to the canonical order of the elements, while the narrative texts have reported a higher frequency of marked orders. From the point of view of complexity, it is clear the tendency in both genres to use the canonical order as a result of simplification, both following a process of simplification of an original text, and when the text is natively conceived as a simple text. Regardless of gender, the most complex phenomenon is the use of subordinates. In both genera clearly prevail subordinate poses to the main as they are easier to process and when this position is not respected there is a tendency to simplify the subordinate itself both in terms of number of words, but above all structurally, in terms of depth of the syntactic subtree. Finally, it should be recalled that all the observations contained in this study are based on texts that are automatically noted, which are therefore subject to error. Despite this, we expect that at least limited to the analysis of texts of the same domain and variety of language, the distributions of errors are similar, thus allowing an internal comparison with the linguistic parameters investigated. The reliability of the data discussed is also corroborated by the fact that they were considered standard texts, linguistically close to those on which automatic annotation tools are typically trained. On the other hand, precisely because the distribution of errors may vary as the domain of texts changes, among the developments of this work we intend to carry out sample analyses to verify the impact of the error on the comparisons obtained with the different structures examined.