  Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical
information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in
sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like
Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for
languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as those languages (also) use the
internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical
relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than
1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in more than 1,100
different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6
billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale
evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed
by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal
word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information
tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. In addition, we
find that - despite differences in the way information is expressed - there is
also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon
that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the
word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa.
We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode
information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand,
content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very
similar ways.
