Dunn et al. on word order typology in "Nature"

[Michael Dunn]

Thanks Martin for the kind words!

We've put together some materials for non-experts to help with
understanding the paper: http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/wordorder/
I'm sorry that these are not currently at the appropriate level for
typologists, but we'll add to them as necessary.

I don't quite get your parenthesis at the end: one of the points of the
paper is that we use a particularly stringent and statistically powerful
control for genealogical relatedness, and nevertheless (i) don't find
many of the expected correlations, (ii) find many correlation which were
unexpected, and (iii) find that even where dependencies are found
between the same pairs of features in two lineages, the evolutionary
models underlying these dependencies are different.

Best, Michael

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:06:41PM +0200, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> In my recollection, this is the first typology article to be
> published in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09923.html.
> Congratulations to our colleagues in Auckland and Nijmegen!
> 
> There is also a popularized account in Nature News
> (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110413/full/news.2011.231.html),
> and a Nature editorial about "Universal truths"
> (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7342/full/472136a.html).
> How wonderful to see that typology has become so important!
> 
> (Unfortunately, I don't see what is new in the paper -- maybe
> someone can explain this? Didn't we know all along that we are not
> likely to get correlations if we don't control for genealogical
> relatedness?)
> 
> Martin

-- 
Michael Dunn, Max Planck Research Group Leader:
 Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
PB310, 6500AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands
 http://www.mpi.nl/people/dunn-michael | office: +31 (0)24 3521181
 http://www.mpi.nl/research/research-projects/evolutionary-processes
 http://www.mpi.nl/eoss | Evolution of Semantic Systems consortium