The one part that directly contradicted Chomsky was the argument languages tend to minimise dependency length, which flies in the face of long range dependencies like question movement, topicalisation, pronoun binding etc. And misses the main point Chomsky was making: why have a system with movement?
The article seems to be arguing that statistically most sentences (in most languages) are simple. OK, sentences like "Which boys do the girls expect to fight each other?" may not be common, but you instantly understand that "each other" binds not to the closer "the girls", but the long range dependency "which boys". In order to understand it you reconstruct the question to its original position "the girls expect <which boys> to fight each other" to know that the boys are the ones fighting, and bind to each other (the boys are fighting the boys)
Why have a system like that (in basically every language)? How is that optimised for simple dependencies & communication?
The article seems to be arguing that statistically most sentences (in most languages) are simple. OK, sentences like "Which boys do the girls expect to fight each other?" may not be common, but you instantly understand that "each other" binds not to the closer "the girls", but the long range dependency "which boys". In order to understand it you reconstruct the question to its original position "the girls expect <which boys> to fight each other" to know that the boys are the ones fighting, and bind to each other (the boys are fighting the boys)
Why have a system like that (in basically every language)? How is that optimised for simple dependencies & communication?