<div dir="ltr"><div><br></div>Of course, rarity might have all sorts of reasons. In something I recently wrote, I try to list a few types of <b>diachronic </b>sources for cross-linguistic rarity. Here's a small chunk.<br><br><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></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><br></span>
<table class="" style="border-collapse:collapse;border:medium none" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody><tr style="mso-yfti-irow:0;mso-yfti-firstrow:yes;mso-prop-change:owner 20151116T1439">
<td style="border-width:1pt medium;border-style:solid none;border-color:windowtext -moz-use-text-color;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Type</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border-width:1pt medium;border-style:solid none;border-color:windowtext -moz-use-text-color;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Factor</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border-width:1pt medium;border-style:solid none;border-color:windowtext -moz-use-text-color;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Rare
feature</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border-width:1pt medium;border-style:solid none;border-color:windowtext -moz-use-text-color;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Documentation</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow:1;mso-prop-change:owner 20151116T1439">
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<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">pathway</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Few (vs. many) pathways</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">closed syllables </span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">many languages</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow:2;mso-prop-change:owner 20151116T1439">
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<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">stages</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Many (vs. few) stages necessary</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">endoclitics</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Udi (Harris 2008)</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow:3;mso-prop-change:owner 20151116T1439">
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<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">source</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Rare (vs. common) source construction</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">adverbial subordinator prefixes </span></p>
</td>
<td style="border:medium none;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Japhug (Grossman et al. submitted)</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow:4;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes;mso-prop-change:owner 20151116T1439">
<td style="border-width:medium medium 1pt;border-style:none none solid;border-color:-moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color windowtext;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<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">type</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border-width:medium medium 1pt;border-style:none none solid;border-color:-moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color windowtext;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Rare type of change</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border-width:medium medium 1pt;border-style:none none solid;border-color:-moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color windowtext;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">coronal annihilation</span></p>
</td>
<td style="border-width:medium medium 1pt;border-style:none none solid;border-color:-moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color windowtext;padding:0cm 5.4pt" valign="top">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Northwest Mekeo (Blevins 2009)</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">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><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><br><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></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"">One could also add the controversial possibility of inherent (in)stability of a particular feature.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:115%"><br><span style="font-size:11pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></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""><br></span></p>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Eitan Grossman<div>Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences<br></div><div>Hebrew University of Jerusalem</div><div>Tel: +972 2 588 3809</div><div>Fax: +972 2 588 1224</div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 4:20 PM, Matthew Dryer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dryer@buffalo.edu" target="_blank">dryer@buffalo.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div><span class="">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Courier">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> </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>
</span>Best,<span> </span>Peter<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
</span><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="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><u></u><u></u></font></span></p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Matthew<u></u><u></u></p></font></span><span class="">
<br>
On 1/26/16 7:10 AM,
Peter Arkadiev wrote:<br>
</span></div><span class="">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>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>
</blockquote>
<br>
</span></div>
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