  We address recent criticisms (Liu et al., 2015; Ferrer-i-Cancho and
G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez, 2015) of our work on empirical evidence of dependency
length minimization across languages (Futrell et al., 2015). First, we
acknowledge error in failing to acknowledge Liu (2008)'s previous work on
corpora of 20 languages with similar aims. A correction will appear in PNAS.
Nevertheless, we argue that our work provides novel, strong evidence for
dependency length minimization as a universal quantitative property of
languages, beyond this previous work, because it provides baselines which focus
on word order preferences. Second, we argue that our choices of baselines were
appropriate because they control for alternative theories.
