ABSTRACT
As one of the most important parts of the book, this chapter focuses on syntactic dependency structures, using both language-in-the-line and language-in-the-bag methods. Homogeneity of the sub-corpora is validated through an examination of parts of speech (POS) and dependency relations/syntactic roles. The concept of sequencing is proposed here, that is, all the possible ordered strings from a sentence. The author first examines the sequencings of the seven combinations of a complete syntactic dependency structure—“dependent + governor = syntactic function/dependency relation”, where both the dependent and governor refer to their POS property or word class. All rank-frequency distributions of the combinations and their motifs are found to observe the same distribution models. Another two highlighted discussions are syntactic valencies (number of dependents) and syntactic dependency distances. Some mechanisms of minimisation of dependency distances are discussed. The author validates the linguistic status of syntactic dependency structures, valency and dependency distance and argues they are results of diversification processes.
