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

[Matthew Dryer]

Regarding

"But the usual understanding of statistical universal (e.g. Dryer 1998) 
is that statistical universals are universal tendencies: the tendency 
itself should be present universally. If the tendency is absent in some 
lineage then it's not a statistical universal (unless you wish to admit 
statistical statistical universals!), it's a lineage specific process."

That is most emphatically not what anyone has ever meant by a 
statistical universal.  I doubt that anyone has ever proposed a 
statistical universal that was not already known not to manifest itself 
in all language families.  If something is found in more language 
families than one expects due to chance, then it is a statistical 
universal.  That's all.

To make this more concrete, consider instances of competing motivations, 
since this a particularly clear case where we don't expect statistical 
universals to manifest themselves in all language families.  Jack 
Hawkins has argued that there are in effect two competing motivations 
underlying the order of relative clause and noun.  One of these is a 
principle whose effect can be expressed by a statistical universal "A 
language is RelN if and only if it is OV".  The other is a principle 
whose effect can be expressed by a statistical universal "Languages tend 
to be NRel rather  than RelN".  Now these two principles are in 
competition in OV languages, one principle favouring OV&RelN, the other 
favouring OV&NRel.  The claim is that these two principles are universal 
in the sense that they exert functional pressure on all languages. 
However, they certainly are not universal in the sense that we will see 
their effects in all language families.  While there may be some 
families in which the effects of both principles manifest themselves, it 
is far more common for one principle or the other to "win out" in a 
given language family so that each of the two statistical universals 
that result from these two principles will manifest themselves only in 
some language families.  Many of the differences between families 
discussed in the paper probably reflect nothing more than competing 
motivations.

There are two issues here.  One is the detailed nature of the 
differences between language families discussed in the paper.  These are 
certainly worth examining and potentially revealing and the software 
Dunn et al use may indeed be useful to bringing out these patterns.  But 
in my opinion what they might reveal is universal  principles.  Where we 
find differences between families, they may reflect different options 
which are universally available.  However, I admit that there is 
certainly room for various alternative interpretations of these patterns.

The second issue is whether the data provide any evidence against 
existing claims in word order typology.  Here there is less room for 
debate: it is clear that they don't.  While there is room for different 
interpretations of the data presented in their paper, this data does not 
provide any argument against existing claims.

Matthew

Michael Dunn wrote:
> Thanks for your comments, Matthew.  And thanks Jess Tauber for putting
> up a link. Here's another link that should give free access to both the
> paper and the supplementary materials (also important, given the brevity
> of Nature papers): http://www.mpi.nl/publications/escidoc-95245/
> 
> I'd like to respond to Matthew's comments on the list, because I think
> they touch on some issues which are important to all linguistic
> typologists.
> 
> The claim that some word order dependencies should only exist ACROSS
> families but not WITHIN them needs unpacking. Unrelated languages are
> products of historical processes too, it's just that these historical
> processes are unknown or (if you use sampling methods) ignored. The
> Phylogenetic Comparative Method test for dependency used in our paper
> (described in the Supplementary Materials) controls for genealogical
> relatedness by looking within a lineage and inferring the extent to
> which changes in two features are 'coupled'. In some cases, changes in
> one feature are regularly associated with changes in another, in other
> cases they're not. For the well-known correlation between verb-object
> order and Adposition order, phylogenetic comparative methods do detect
> the correlation within the Indo-European and Austronesian families. But
> the correlation is absent in Uto-Aztecan, despite that fact that
> verb-object orders and adposition orders do change within the history of
> the family.
> 
> It could be argued I suppose that this is a statistical universal. But
> the usual understanding of statistical universal (e.g. Dryer 1998) is
> that statistical universals are universal tendencies: the tendency
> itself should be present universally. If the tendency is absent in some
> lineage then it's not a statistical universal (unless you wish to admit
> statistical statistical universals!), it's a lineage specific process.
> 
> As to the unexpected correlations, Dryer 2007 ("Word Order", in the
> Shopen trilogy) makes strong statements about what word order features
> show intercorrelation and what don't. Our results (Figure 2) show that
> this differs from lineage to lineage. A correlation between SV and OV
> exists in Uto-Aztecan, but not any of the other families. There is no
> correlation between order of adjective and noun and relative clause
> order in Indo-European (although there is in Austronesian and
> Uto-Aztecan), but Indo-European alone does have an evolutionary
> correlation between adjective-noun and genitive-noun orders.
> 
> So far I've just been talking about tests for the existence of
> dependencies between particular pairs of features. An additional thing
> we get for free from the comparative phylogenetic approach is an
> explicit model of evolutionary change for each feature. Where a pair of
> features are correlated, the method infers which changes between states
> are more or less probable.  Figure 3 in the paper shows the different
> models of transition probabilities inferred between VO and adposition
> states in Austronesian and Indo-European. The patterns of evolutionary
> change inferred in the two families are different from one another:
> these features are dependent in both families, but it's not the same
> dependency. We can do this for any grammatical dependency detected in a
> family, something I am quite excited about for future work.
> 
> I hope this somewhat clarifies things for LingTyp readers. I would be
> happy to expand on this discussion if there's interest.
> 
> Best, Michael
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 06:59:39PM -0400, Matthew Dryer wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> 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
>