recent paper (Dunn et al. in Nature)

[Tom Givon]

I think Florian makes some very good points, and I am looking forward to 
reading the actual studies he cited. My concern with our (all of us's) 
functional theories is that they are usually observations about the 
final (synchronic) product of the protracted diachronic process(es) that 
create grammatical structures. From my perspective, we need to look at 
how functional-adaptive factors operate during the process itself. In 
other words, we need to find a way of studying the mechanisms (and exact 
loci) where universal principles exert their influence on emerging 
structures. As we operate now, a lot of our functional observation are 
both ad-hoc & post-hoc. This of course reminds me of the "iconicity era" 
of the 1980s, when we were busy observing that the resultant emerging 
structures were "iconic", but paid no attention to the biological 
processes via which such iconicity arose. So for those of you who would 
like to consider themselves "cognitive", this is, to my mind, the real 
challenge. And obviously, experimental studies of on-line behavior are a 
big chunk of trying to understand the mechanisms of emergence. TG

==================

On 7/9/2011 1:47 PM, T. Florian Jaeger wrote:
> 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