treebanks; Universal Dependencies; typology; language family; Directional Dependency Distance

The present paper shows how the current Universal Dependency treebanks can be used for language typology studies and can reveal structural syntactic features of languages. Two methods, one existing method and one newly proposed method, based on dependency treebanks as typological measurements, are presented and tested in order to assess both the coherence of the underlying syntactic data and the validity of the methods themselves. The results show that both methods are valid for positioning a language in the typological continuum, although they probably reveal different typological features of languages.