recent paper (Dunn et al. in Nature)

[T. Florian Jaeger]

Hi,

I share Martin's view that the hypothesis that 'universals' are the direct
product of diachronic pathways is absolutely compatible with both functional
and non-functional explanations (by the Croft et al, submitted to LT
discusses the Dunn et al paper and what they do and do not show in detail).
There is now a growing body of work that investigates this claim more
directly by looking at biases operating during the acquisition of artificial
grammars. This work has revealed strong biases to 'regularize' (reduce the
conditional entropy of morphological or word order alternations, e.g.
Hudsan-Kam and Newport, 2005, 2009; Kirby et al. 2008; Smith and Wonnacut,
2010; Gutman, 2011). This work has replicated Greenbergian universals in the
lab, although most universals remain untested in this terminology
(e.g. Christiansen, 2000; Culbertson and Smolensky, forthcoming a, b; Tily
et al., 2011). In addition and more recently, this work has also directly
addressed whether considerations about processing or communication (not
quite the same) affect the acquisition of word order and case-marking
systems (Fedzechkina et al., 2011, forthcoming). This work is summarized in
a very short commentary on Dunn et al.'s article that Harry Tily and I
submitted to LT (see link below).

This line of research is beginning to explore the link between acquisition
and diachronic pathways (e.g. via iterated artificial language learning).
Both functional and non-functional explanations for changes are being
explored.

I also wanted to add that, in addition to Dryer's and Hawkins's
processing-based accounts, there are now also information theoretic accounts
that make predictions about the development of word order (and other)
alternations based on considerations about efficient and robust information
transfer (cf. Shannon, 1948). These formal accounts can be seen as quite
similar to some hypotheses mentioned in your [Tom's] work). See for example,
Maurits et al (2010-NIPS,
http://www.psychology.adelaide.edu.au/personalpages/staff/amyperfors/papers/mauritsetal10nips-wordorderuid.pdf).
These accounts test the predictions of a framework laid out in Genzel and
Charniak (2002), Aylett and Turk (2004), Jaeger (2006, 2010) and Levy and
Jaeger (2007). In this work, choices in production are linked to
considerations about efficient and robust communication through a noisy
channel. Most of this work has focused on reduction phenomena (incl.
relativizer and complementizers omission, contraction of auxiliaries,
phonetic reduction, argument omission, prononominalization, etc.; for a
overview and references, see Jaeger, 2010,
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010028510000083), but Maurits
et al provide the first extension to word order choices (see also Gallo
(2011,
https://urresearch.rochester.edu/fileDownloadForInstitutionalItem.action?itemId=13759&itemFileId=31899)
for the same principle at work beyond intra-clausal planning.

Florian


Links to papers that I have links to are given below. The first paper
contains all references mentioned above:

Tily and Jaeger (submitted commentary on Dunn et al):
http://rochester.academia.edu/tiflo/Papers/674181/Tily_H._and_Jaeger_T.F._submitted._Complementing_quantitative_typology_with_behavioral_approaches_Evidence_for_typological_universals

Fedzechkina et al (2011):
http://rochester.academia.edu/tiflo/Papers/674181/Tily_H._and_Jaeger_T.F._submitted._Complementing_quantitative_typology_with_behavioral_approaches_Evidence_for_typological_universals

Tily et al (2011):
http://rochester.academia.edu/tiflo/Papers/674181/Tily_H._and_Jaeger_T.F._submitted._Complementing_quantitative_typology_with_behavioral_approaches_Evidence_for_typological_universals