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<p>I agree with Peter that the corpus-based methods employed by
Hawkins, Wälchli, Cysouw, Levshina and others have been very
important, and also with Jürgen that "when confronting the causal
inference problem in typology, we must consider every source of
evidence that we can get our hands on."</p>
<p>But I don't agree with Peter that "the whole enterprise [of overcoming
genealogical and areal biases] does not appear to be very
productive", and I don't agree with Jürgen that we "must
eventually move from secondary data typology to primary data
typology".</p>
<p>I think that the enterprise of controlling for family and contact
effects is absolutely necessary, because otherwise we cannot
distinguish outcomes of universal/non-historical factors from
outcomes of historical events. Peter recognizes this implicitly
when he says that we should "combine experimental research ...
with a quantitative study of variation in corpora across a small
number of sufficiently distinct languages". That's precisely the
point: Which languages are "sufficiently distinct"? And hasn't the
search for empirical universals been *highly productive* over the
last few decades? The recent paper by Verkerk et al. (2025) has
found good evidence for most of the empirical universals that had
been seriously discussed earlier, so the Greenbergian universals
seem to very robust findings compared to many other prestigious
claims in linguistics.</p>
<p>And I think that there is no reason to abandon secondary-data
typology just because we can also (increasingly) do primary-data
typology. Typological comparison can be done at multiple scales
and multiple levels of granularity, and it is not clear that we
can dispense with any of these levels. For example, we want to do
typology of phonological segments (along the lines of the
Phoible.org database), or typology of word meanings (lexification
typology, cf. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://clics.clld.org/">https://clics.clld.org/</a>), and for these, it seems
that secondary data will not be easily replaced.</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Martin</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 21.11.25 16:04, Juergen Bohnemeyer
wrote:<br>
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Dear Peter — I’m a massive fan of corpus-based typology. More
broadly, there is no question in my mind that we should, and
must, eventually move from secondary data typology to primary
data typology. Nobody seems to deny that secondary data typology
is fraught with too many problematic idealizations: in
particular, it reduces entire languages to single observations,
and it suffers from incomparable decisions on what is treated as
a language in different parts of the world. </div>
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(The second problem is closely related to, but not entirely
identical with, the countability problem Ian Joo mentions. The
fact that
<i>language</i> is a count noun is a powerful illustration of
how ordinary language can frame reality in ways that may impede
scientific progress if it goes unchecked, as Whorf pointed out.
However, actually counting languages is not the issue for
regression-based modeling, since regression models don’t operate
on counts. But the question whether what is treated as an
observation (i.e., a language) is uniform across the sample is
of course very much a concern for the validity of sampling-based
and regression-based modeling alike.)</div>
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There is a broader answer to your question, though: as a matter
of course, when confronting the causal inference problem in
typology (i.e., when hunting for the causal forces that shape
languages), we must consider every source of evidence that we
can get our hands on. Aside from corpus-based typology, this
includes field-based psycholinguistics and the toolkit of
evolutionary linguistics, including simulations and miniature
artificial language experiments. </div>
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Let me also suggest a distinction between methods that are
primarily geared toward the discovery of typological
distributions and the examination of their statistical
properties and methods than can be used to test hypotheses of
causal inference (i.e., explanatory hypotheses). Experimental
research such as what I just mentioned has its uses primarily
for testing explanatory hypotheses. Corpus-based research can
have both functions. But if we want to use corpora to discover
typological distributions, we’ll need very large parallax corpus
databases. As are being developed now. </div>
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Best — Juergen</div>
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<p
style="margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><span
style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: black;">Juergen
Bohnemeyer (He/Him)<br>
Professor, Department of Linguistics<br>
University at Buffalo <br>
<br>
Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus<br>
Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 <br>
Phone: (716) 645 0127 <br>
Fax: (716) 645 3825<br>
Email: </span><span
style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: rgb(0, 120, 212);"><u><a
href="mailto:jb77@buffalo.edu"
title="mailto:jb77@buffalo.edu"
data-outlook-id="4905ccdf-3cd0-4f5b-b56c-c0fede9584e6"
style="color: rgb(0, 120, 212); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">jb77@buffalo.edu</a></u></span><span
style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: black;"><br>
Web: </span><span
style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: rgb(5, 99, 193);"><u><a
href="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/"
title="http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/"
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style="color: rgb(5, 99, 193); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/</a></u></span><span
style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: black;"> <br>
<br>
</span><span style="color: black;">Office hours Tu/Th
3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520
2411; Passcode Hoorheh) </span><span
style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: black;"><br>
<br>
There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets
In <br>
(Leonard Cohen) </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">-- </p>
<p
style="margin: 0in; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </p>
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<b>From: </b>Lingtyp
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org"><lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org></a> on behalf of
Peter Arkadiev via Lingtyp
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org"><lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org></a><br>
<b>Date: </b>Friday, November 21, 2025 at 05:59<br>
<b>To: </b>Martin Haspelmath
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de"><martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de></a>, Linguistic Typology
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org"><lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org></a><br>
<b>Subject: </b>Re: [Lingtyp] Reporting cross-linguistic
frequencies<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Dear
Martin, dear all,</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing"> </div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">I
am starting to wonder whether statistical analysis of a
language sample is at all a suitable method for "detecting
universal tendencies that are caused by
universal/non-historical factors" (Martin's formulation).
Given that there is no consensus as for how to overcome
genealogical and areal biases and even whether those biases
must be overcome at all and what trying to overcome them
actually gets us (apart from getting some of us high-profile
publications with ever more complicated mathematical apparatus
which others among us struggle to understand and cannot
evaluate; not being in any way a "mathematically-gifted
person", to borrow Stela's expression, I belong to the latter
group), the whole enterprise does not appear to be very
productive. What if the more appropriate method, at least if
purported functional factors are being concerned, is the one
employed by John Hawkins, Natalia Levshina and some others,
i.e. to combine experimental research on production /
processing with a quantitative study of variation in corpora
across a small number of sufficiently distinct languages? If
we can show that certain well-defined factors are operative in
language processing and result in skewed distributions in
corpora ultimately translatable into tendencies of diachronic
change, and moreover are able to corroborate these results by
similarly skewed distributions of variables in reasonably
designed cross-linguistic samples, then what else do we need?
In any case, as has been repeatedly stated many times, even if
we find that in a certain language sample, however
well-designed, a certain variable shows a clearly skewed
distribution of, say 80% vs 20%, nothing follows from this in
terms of "universal preferences" unless we are able to
independently show that the more frequent value is in some or
other way "preferred" in processing / production etc. I am
sorry if the above is self-evident or naive.</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing"> </div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Best
regards,</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing"> </div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Peter<br>
</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing"> </div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">----------------</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Кому:
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>
(<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>);</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Тема:
[Lingtyp] Reporting cross-linguistic frequencies;</div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">21.11.2025,
10:19, "Martin Haspelmath via Lingtyp"
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org"><lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org></a>:</div>
<blockquote>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Thanks,
Jürgen! I like the "wave vs. particle" analogy, because
these concrete expressions help us make sense of what seems
to be going on (given the experimental results).</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">In
worldwide comparative linguistics, we also want to make
sense of what is going on, but it seems to me that we need
analogies not only for interpreting results, but also for
understanding what we are aiming for. For me, "removing
areal and genealogical/phylogenetic bias" has the aim of
detecting universal tendencies that are caused by
universal/non-historical factors.</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">I
would think that on the imagined concrete scenario of a
sample of isolated isolates (e.g. 100 languages that have
long existed on isolated islands, maybe of the Rapanui
type), looking at these 100 isolates should give the same
results as looking at 100 sample languages from larger
families that have been shaped also by contact.</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Are
there reasons to doubt this? If not, then we can take the
"isolated isolates" scenario simply as a way of illustrating
our goals in concrete terms (somewhat like "wave" and
"particle" serve as concrete illustrations). </p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">But
maybe the imagined scenario (which is not an "assumption"!!)
is somehow problematic, because the goals of our enterprise
are DIFFERENT. In Bickel's (2007) paper (LiTy 11), which has
been widely cited, the idea seems to be that looking for
"history-free" tendencies is somehow an obsolete goal.</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Some
people have suggested that in identifying universal trends,
one MUST take into account genealogies, and isolates are
problematic because they are not part of any genealogy. This
is because we should not look primarily at languages, but at
*transitions* (changes from one type to another). If I
understood Verkerk et al. (2025) correctly, they solved the
"isolates problem" by using an artificial world tree (where
all languages are somehow included; the very beautiful tree
is used in <a
href="https://www.mpg.de/25723124/1114-evan-enduring-patterns-in-the-world-s-languages-150495-x"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
originalsrc="https://www.mpg.de/25723124/1114-evan-enduring-patterns-in-the-world-s-languages-150495-x"
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the press release</a>). Are Verkerk et al. pursuing a
different goal? That is not really clear to me.</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">I
find the notion of an artificial world tree profoundly
strange, much stranger than the hypothetical scenario of 100
isolates on remote islands. But maybe it is needed, because
the goal of the enterprise is somehow different (along
Bickel's lines)? So I like the imagined "isolated isolates"
scenario also because it clarifies what I'm interested in.</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">(And
isn't Trudgill's idea that isolates are somehow "exotic"
very speculative? Shcherbakova et al. 2023 have not provided
strong evidence against the idea, but they simply did not
find evidence in favour of it.)</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">One
last point: Yes, all isolates are survivors from some larger
family, but why is that relevant? Languages may have existed
for half a million years or longer, and we know almost
nothing about that deep past. Most of the currently existing
families probably had more branches in earlier times, and
the protolanguages we reconstruct may or may not have been
isolates themselves. We cannot tell, but I don't see why we
would need to know.</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Best,</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Martin</p>
<p class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing"> </p>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">On
21.11.25 07:07, Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp wrote:</div>
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Dear all — Here’s a quick explanation of why the
assumption of an “isolated isolate” is profoundly
strange: </div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Leaving aside sign
languages, constructed languages, and artificial
languages, nobody seems to entertain the possibility
that languages have emerged spontaneously out of
something that we wouldn’t consider a language itself
over the last few thousands of years. In other words,
the languages we consider isolates are without exception
lone survivors; but they did descend from ancestors
which are often
</span><span
style="font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">lost and
unknown</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, and these
ancestors biased the offshoot's properties by dint of
inheritance/transmission.</span></div>
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<br>
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The reason isolates are interesting from a sampling
perspective is that they may represent entire genera or
families without forcing us to pick a member. But being an
isolate does not mean being free of phylogenetic bias. On
the contrary: isolates of unknown descend are actually
particularly problematic in the sense that they are shaped
by biases that we have no way of identifying directly
since the biasing ancestors have been lost to time.</div>
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<br>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">As to contact. Languages
that are not in contact with other languages over long
stretches of time are extremely rare and unusual. In
fact, as I’m sure everyone here is aware, such languages
have been plausibly argued to tend to evolve exotic
properties as a result of their isolation (</span><span
style="font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Lupyan
& Dale 2010;
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Trudgill 2011),
although this is controversial (Shcherbakova et al.
2023). In any case, I would certainly not want to make
such languages the basis for causal inference in
typology.</span></div>
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But it gets a lot worse. The “isolated isolate”
interpretation doesn’t just require us to think of a
language that isn’t currently in contact with any other
language. We would have to assume a language that has
<b>never</b> come into contact with any other language at
any point in its history (at least not long/intensively
enough to change as a result of it). I’m seriously
uncertain whether such a language has ever existed on this
planet. </div>
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Here’s an analogy from quantum mechanics: Schrödinger’s
and Heisenberg’s equations are mathematical models that
describe the experimentally observed behavior of
elementary particles under various conditions. The
particle and the wave interpretation are interpretations
that we use to make sense of these mathematical models. We
find these models useful because most of us don’t think in
mathematical equations (not even theoretical physicists,
it would seem). But if we push these interpretations
beyond a certain point, they break down. To begin with, we
can’t think of something simultaneously as a wave and as a
particle. </div>
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In the same way, we can mathematically describe the
influence phylogeny and areality exert on the probability
of a particular language having certain properties. The
“isolated isolate” interpretation is just that - an
interpretation of the statistical models; but, as I tried
to show above, it runs into absurdities rather more
quickly than the particle and wave interpretations in
quantum mechanics. </div>
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<br>
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Best — Juergen</div>
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G. Lupyan, R. Dale, Language structure is partly
determined by social structure. PLOS ONE5, e8559 (2010).</div>
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O. Shcherbakova, S. M. Michaelis, H. J. Haynie, et al.
Societies of strangers do not speak less complex
languages.
<i>Scientific Advances </i>9, eadf7704 (2023).</div>
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P. Trudgill, <i>Sociolinguistic Typology: Social
Determinants of Linguistic Complexity
</i>(OxfordUniv. Press, 2011).</div>
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<div
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<p
style="margin: 0in; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><span
style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 9pt; color: black;">Juergen
Bohnemeyer (He/Him)<br>
Professor, Department of Linguistics<br>
University at Buffalo <br>
<br>
Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus<br>
Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 <br>
Phone: (716) 645 0127 <br>
Fax: (716) 645 3825<br>
Email: </span><span
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<b>From: </b>Lingtyp <a
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<lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org></a> on
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<lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org></a><br>
<b>Date: </b>Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 04:01<br>
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<b>Subject: </b>Re: [Lingtyp] Reporting
cross-linguistic frequencies<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="662abf391f8b56b11ba8165b7bd48bb4PlainText"
style="font-size: 11pt;">I'll jump in with some
thoughts.<br>
<br>
<br>
- Dryer's method and ours aim at doing basically the
same thing:<br>
quantifying what's "left" after removing genetic and
areal bias.<br>
<br>
- Whether you should call them proportions or adjusted
frequencies...<br>
I'm not sure that it matters that much? As long as you
understand how<br>
they were calculated...<br>
<br>
- How you want to interpret this "what's left" is
debatable, I guess,<br>
but I don't think I agree with Jürgen. As far as I can
tell it should be<br>
compatible with something along the lines of an
"isolated isolate" as<br>
described by Martin. You can also see them as
'universal' preferences<br>
(more or less the same thing?).<br>
<br>
- "the probability of a random language having a certain
property<br>
depends on (or is influenced by, or varies with, etc.)
it being related<br>
to certain other languages, or being spoken (or signed)
in a particular<br>
area" -> In our approach we assumes that the
probability of a language L<br>
having some feature value F depends on three things: 1)
its relatedness<br>
to other languages, 2) its contact to other languages,
3) some universal<br>
preference for F. Kind of the point of what we do is
that we try to<br>
estimate each of these factors. [We can add more factors
and more<br>
structure, but that's the most basic model]<br>
<br>
- You can quantify the contribution of the phylogenetic
component and<br>
the areal component(s) with our techniques, but this is
a bit tricky<br>
because there is unavoidable overlap in the information
each one<br>
contains. These measures also have a different meaning
than the adjusted<br>
frequency and can't be used as a replacement for them,
you can use them<br>
in addition to.<br>
<br>
<br>
Matías<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
El 20/11/25 a las 9:36, Omri Amiraz via Lingtyp
escribió:<br>
> Dear all,<br>
> I agree with Ian that, in addition to genealogical
and areal biases,<br>
> the very question of what counts as a language
versus a dialect is<br>
> partly subjective. This makes actual frequencies
even more<br>
> problematic, since we would obtain different
results depending on<br>
> whether we treat Wu Chinese as one language or as
thirty separate<br>
> languages, as Ian pointed out.<br>
> Juergen wrote: "We can empirically assess the
extent to which the<br>
> probability of a random language having a certain
property depends on<br>
> (or is influenced by, or varies with, etc.) it
being related to<br>
> certain other languages, or being spoken (or
signed) in a particular<br>
> area."<br>
><br>
> I wonder whether it might be useful to have a
measure of the<br>
> genealogical and areal spread of a feature,
essentially quantifying<br>
> how broadly it is distributed across families and
regions in the<br>
> present-day world. Such a measure might be more
straightforward to<br>
> interpret than an adjusted frequency/probability,
since it is not<br>
> clear whether the described population is a
hypothetical set of<br>
> isolated isolates or something else.<br>
><br>
> Is anyone aware of an existing metric that captures
genealogical or<br>
> areal spread in this way?<br>
><br>
> Best,<br>
> Omri<br>
><br>
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<pre><div
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Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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D-04103 Leipzig
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<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">,</div>
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<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">-- </div>
<div class="ms-outlook-mobile-reference-message skipProofing">Peter
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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