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

[Michael Dunn]

Hi Søren,

Phylogenetic comparative methods are agnostic to the factor that prompts
the change. The existence of a functional dependency would predict that
the dependent elements would be regularly borrowed together, or if not,
that they would regularly harmonize; conversely, lack of functional
dependency would predict that the features could be borrowed
independently. I'm not sure what the systematic bias would be in that
case: you could argue that contact would exaggerate the appearance of
functional dependency where it doesn't really exist (so, the link
between VO and ADP order in AN might be a replicate of an accidental
association of these features in some non-AN languages), but you could
equally argue that if these features were independent then they
shouldn't be borrowed together so regularly.  Basically, the source of
innovation is not relevant at this level of analysis.

Best, Michael

Link to paper and supplementary materials:
http://www.mpi.nl/publications/escidoc-95245/

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 12:33:09PM +0200, Søren Wichmann wrote:
> The model of coevolution was developed in biology, where it is
> highly meaningful to test whether features that seem to be
> correlated change in tandem along phylogenetic lineages, since
> biological traits normally don't spread laterally (bacteria
> providing a major exception). But for linguistic typological
> features we know that there is a strong areal effect, so if this
> effect is not somehow built into the evolutionary model one can only
> expect results that are difficult to interpret. It is hard to expect
> correct conclusions from the wrong premises. If the premise is that
> correlated linguistic feature should coevolve historically and the
> conclusion is that this evolution is lineage-specific then we should
> pause before accepting this conclusion. If we are to adopt methods
> from biology when studying linguistic typology we should be careful
> about which models to adopt.
> 
> Søren.

-- 
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