our BBS paper

[Östen Dahl]

Dear Tom, 

you write:

> In the case of language, explanatory hypotheses must take into account, 
> communication, cognition, neurology, diachrony, acquisition and 
> evolution.

This is hard to disagree with, although I think a few more areas could be added
(demography, language contact, social structure etc.). However, a bit earlier in
your posting you say:

>And of course, you are absolutely right 
> about his [Greenberg's] word-order universals. Beginning with 1971 (CLS #7
> paper), I have tried to show that their only cogent interpretation is
>diachronic. 

So do you want to say that word-order universals are not in need of any of the
other areas that you listed? Maybe you were here having in mind a generous
definition of "diachrony". Indeed, there are many different kinds of diachronic
explanation, but the problem is that some of them are not exclusively
diachronic. One kind of explanation that you have advocated in your work is
"source-oriented": linguistic structures retain properties of their diachronic
sources. But another kind would be "target-oriented": language change tends to
give rise to certain structures because these structures are in some sense
"preferred". And such an explanation may become quite hard to distinguish from
ones which explain cross-linguistic tendencies in purely functional, synchronic
terms. If we try to apply this to Greenberg's word-order universals, the
source-oriented approach may be used to explain the implicational ones
(languages with word-order A tend to also have word-order B, since B can be
showed to be historically derived from A), but are less plausible for
non-implicational ones (such as "subjects tend to precede objects"). So it seems
to me that your generalization is a bit too sweeping.

Best regards,
Östen