Dunn et al.'s lineage-specific linkages

[Martin Haspelmath]

Yes, Brian, you're right: This is the one thing in the paper that seems 
to be somewhat unexpected. And you're right that one conceivable 
explanation of such "lineage-specific linkages" is that they are really 
typological linkages after all (and thus not really not 
lineage-specific): If a language has noun-like adjectives, it might be 
expected to treat its adjectives like genitives also for word order.

But in reality, a better explanation seems to be language contact: 
Languages that belong to the same lineage are also usually spoken in 
geographic vicinity and are thus likely to be in contact with their 
relatives. In fact it seems that most of the word order changes that can 
be seen in the Austronesian, Indo-European and Uto-Aztecan data are in 
fact due to contact influence.

Martin

Am 7/11/11 11:03 PM, schrieb Brian MacWhinney:
> Tom, Esa, and Florian,
>
>       I'm having some trouble matching up the email commentary on Dunn et al. with the specific findings of that article.  They show, for example a really tight linkage of genitive-noun order with adjective-noun order for Indo-European and no such linkage at all for Uto-Aztecan.  There are perhaps 10 other lineage specific findings, each of them rather interesting.  To explain this, they invoke "lineage-specific processes" which is, of course, just a restatement of the findings.  Then they attribute this to "cultural evolution".  I have no idea what they might be talking about here.  The movement from hunter-gatherer to feudal societies?
>     I totally agree with Florian that psycholinguistic forces may be at play, with Tom that diachronic pathways may be at play, and with Esa that analogy may be at play.  But can anyone get a bit more specific?  To take a relatively easy one, what is it in Indo-European that links the adjective-noun order to the genitive-noun order.  I would guess it is the presence in Indo-European of modifier-head number-gender agreement along with fusional case-marking, right?  And I assume that this just doesn't hold in Uto-Aztecan, right?  Can any of your folks work out some of this for the less typologically-well-versed of us?  They refer specifically to eight lineage-specific dependencies.  Can each of these be given similar accounts and when and where do we also need to invoke accounts based on learning,  processing, and analogy.
>
> -- Brian MacWhinney