Universal Dependencies and Quantitative Typological Trends. A Case Study on Word Order

The paper presents a new methodology aimed at acquiring typological evidence from "gold" treebanks for different languages. In particular, it investigates whether and to what extent algorithms developed for assessing the plausibility of automatically produced syntactic annotations could contribute to shed light on key issues of the linguistic typological literature. It reports the first and promising results of a case study focusing on word order patterns carried out on three different languages (English, Italian and Spanish).