Rediscovering Greenberg’s Word Order Universals in UD

Abstract

This paper discusses an empirical refoundation of selected Greenbergian word order universals based on a data analysis of the Universal Dependencies project. The nature of the data we work on allows us to extract rich details for testing well-known typological universals and constitutes therefore a valuable basis for validating Greenberg’s universals. Our results show that we can refine some Greenbergian universals in a more empirical and accurate way by means of a data-driven typological analysis.