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There was a nice conference on rara and rarissma at the MPI Leipzig some years ago that discusses these issues in depth.
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<div class="">I certainly agree with Larry that the phonological example here doesn’t belong. Something like the unique sounds in the Amazon might. Peter Ladefoged and I wrote on this years ago: <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/416103?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" class="">http://www.jstor.org/stable/416103?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents</a></div>
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<div class="">Dan<br class="">
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<div class="">On Jan 26, 2016, at 9:52 AM, Larry M. HYMAN <<a href="mailto:hyman@berkeley.edu" class="">hyman@berkeley.edu</a>> wrote:</div>
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<div dir="ltr" class="">I've been sitting quietly through all of these exchanges, but now that phonology is prominently cited in Eitan's message, I have to comment that I don't think that closed syllables belong in the table. Everyone agrees that open syllables
are universal, there's no language without them, but closed syllables are not rara in the way the other cited examples are. Perhaps languages that have them are in the minority (has anyone done a count?), and there are languages which have many more open syllables
than closed, but there are natural pathways to obtain closed syllables that are quite frequent, especially syncope. Some languages allow closed syllables only word-finally; others allow them only word-internally. A better example of a phonological rarity is
a velar implosive, which appears in only 5 of the 451 languages in the UPSID database. Of course I don't know how infrequent something has to be to be thought of as "rare".</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 6:29 AM, Eitan Grossman <span dir="ltr" class="">
<<a href="mailto:eitan.grossman@mail.huji.ac.il" target="_blank" class="">eitan.grossman@mail.huji.ac.il</a>></span> wrote:<br class="">
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Of course, rarity might have all sorts of reasons. In something I recently wrote, I try to list a few types of
<b class="">diachronic </b>sources for cross-linguistic rarity. Here's a small chunk.<br class="">
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<span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class=""><span class=""></span>For example, (i) a given feature may be (relatively) rare because there are fewer pathways that lead to the feature than away from it. Bybee (2001: 195-197) provides
evidence for the argument that there are more open syllables than closed syllables, and only open syllables are (nearly) universal, because new open syllables are constantly being created by regular processes of language change (e.g., coda weakening and loss),
while there are fewer processes that lead to closed syllables. Another possibility is that (ii) some rare features may necessitate numerous diachronic ‘steps’ that occur in a certain order in order to develop, as in Harris’ (2008) account of Georgian split
case marking or Udi endoclitics. Yet another possibility is that (iii) a certain feature may require rare input structures, as in Grossman et al. (2015), which argues that adverbial subordinator prefixes are rare because they are facilitated by the relatively
rare VSO order and case prefixes, and are inhibited by other word orders or case suffixes. Finally, Greenberg (1978) has proposed that (iv) some changes simply may be more frequent than others, a view adopted by Blevins (2009), who states that most languages
have coronal segments because coronal maintenance and coronal creation are more frequent than ‘coronal annihilation.’<br class="">
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Type</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Factor</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Rare feature</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Documentation</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";font-variant:small-caps" class="">pathway</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Few (vs. many) pathways</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">closed syllables
</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">many languages</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";font-variant:small-caps" class="">stages</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Many (vs. few) stages necessary</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">endoclitics</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Udi (Harris 2008)</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";font-variant:small-caps" class="">source</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Rare (vs. common) source construction</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">adverbial subordinator prefixes
</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Japhug (Grossman et al. submitted)</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";font-variant:small-caps" class="">type</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Rare type of change</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">coronal annihilation</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Northwest Mekeo (Blevins 2009)</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">Importantly, these types of factors that contribute to cross-linguistic rarity are not mutually exclusive,
and all things being equal, one would assume that a feature that is characterized by more of the above factors would be rarer than one that is characterized by fewer of them.</span></p>
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<span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class=""></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" class="">One could also add the controversial possibility of inherent (in)stability of a particular feature.</span></p>
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<div dir="ltr" class="">Eitan Grossman
<div class="">Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences<br class="">
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<div class="">Hebrew University of Jerusalem</div>
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+972 2 588 3809</a></div>
<div class="">Fax: <a href="tel:%2B972%202%20588%201224" value="+97225881224" target="_blank" class="">
+972 2 588 1224</a></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 4:20 PM, Matthew Dryer <span dir="ltr" class="">
<<a href="mailto:dryer@buffalo.edu" target="_blank" class="">dryer@buffalo.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br class="">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Courier" class="">Matthew writes: "The rara are relevant to typological work in that they are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things, and in so far as that is theory,
they are of theoretical importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."<span class="">
</span>I think this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow "better"
than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common
might have well changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about
frequencies of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.<span class="">
</span>Best,<span class=""> </span>Peter<u class=""></u><u class=""></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I have devoted considerable effort in my published research discussing the problem that Peter describes, showing how it is often the case that a particular language type may be more frequent for nonlinguistic reasons and proposing ways
to factor out these nonlinguistic factors. Thus what I mean by “dominant” does not mean more frequent, but more frequent for what are apparently linguistic reasons.<span class=""><font color="#888888" class=""><u class=""></u><u class=""></u></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Matthew<u class=""></u><u class=""></u></p>
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On 1/26/16 7:10 AM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:<br class="">
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<pre class="">Matthew writes:
"The rara are relevant to typological work in that they are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things, and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."
I think this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow "better" than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common might have well changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about frequencies of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.
Best,
Peter</pre>
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