Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages

Understand

Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language.

• For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like "The dog chewed the bone" even though the status of "dog" as subject and "bone" as object can be inferred from world knowledge and plausibility.
• Quantifying how often this redundancy occurs, and how the level of redundancy varies across typologically diverse languages, can shed light on the function and evolution of grammar.
• To that end, we performed a behavioral experiment in English and Russian and a cross-linguistic computational analysis measuring the redundancy of grammatical cues in transitive clauses extracted from corpus text.