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

[Matthew Dryer]

I am not sure whether this list is the appropriate venue for commenting 
on the paper in Nature by Michael Dunn et al.  But since it is, as 
Martin said, unusual for a typological paper to appear in Nature, and 
since the paper was brought up on this list, I think some very brief 
comments are in order.  My apologies to people on the list who have not 
had an opportunity to read the paper.

Put briefly, the paper is based on major misunderstandings of the claims 
of word order typology.  All of the results of the paper are already 
familiar to me and are entirely consistent with claims that have been 
made in the word order literature.  If I can take the liberty of quoting 
Michael's own words from his email,

"(i) don't find many of the expected correlations"

What the paper shows is that we often don't find the expected 
correlations WITHIN language families.  But there are many reasons why 
we should expect this, and nothing in the word order literature would 
lead us to expect otherwise.  We only expect to find the expected 
correlations ACROSS families.

"(ii) find many correlations which were unexpected"

In fact, the correlations of this sort mentioned in the paper are 
well-known, such as the correlation between the order of adjective and 
noun and the order of relative clause and noun.  There is nothing 
unexpected about these correlations.

"(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"

There are potentially novel results here, but I see no reason to think 
that these differences are due to anything other than random variation.

Matthew

Michael Dunn wrote:
> 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
>