Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality

Abstract Based on samples from two corpora, we found that Chinese objects tend to be much shorter than English objects, and that unlike in English, Chinese subjects and objects tend to have similar lengths when their information status is controlled. These differences can be explained in terms of a universal need for dependency distance minimization (DDM), reflecting different strategies of sentence organization to meet the universal constraint of working memory. These DDM-driven syntactic diversities may be irrelevant to grammaticality, but contribute to the smoothness of sentences, because they are shaped by the universal need to reduce the cognitive burden during comprehension. It is perhaps in these common cognitive and functional constraints that we are to find true language universals, universals embodied in linguistic diversity.