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

[Bill Croft]

We should not lose sight of what is good in Dunn et al.'s Nature 
article. Many typologists, starting with Greenberg, have argued that 
synchronic language universals are really just manifestations of 
diachronic universals. The state-process model used by Dunn et al. 
(see p. 5 of their supplementary materials) has been used by 
Greenberg (1978) and Maslova (2000). Dunn et al.'s method (and also 
Maslova's) allows us to take a major problem with sampling - 
historical dependence - and exploit it to uncover valid language 
universals. Using quantitative and statistical techniques will allow 
us to make more precise generalizations and assign a degree of 
goodness of fit to our theoretical models of typological universals.

Nevertheless, like others here, I am unconvinced of the results due 
to problems with the way they apply the method. Dunn et al.'s 
analysis (pp. 5-6 of the supplementary materials) treats two models 
as mutually exclusive: an "independent" model, in which a word order 
switches independently of other orders, possibly with a weighted 
preference for one order; and a "dependent" model, in which two word 
orders are linked and change together. These competing models are 
tested against each phylogeny (family tree), with one or the other 
winning out (*very* crudely, if branches with linked changes 
outnumber branches with single order changes, then the test takes the 
word-order correlation as justified for the tree). But this does not 
test the model that most typologists assume; at best it tests the 
oversimplified model of Theo Vennemann and Winfrid Lehmann from the 
1970s, which reduced the diversity of word order in the world's 
languages to just two types, VO and OV. (This is also basically the 
generative head-ordering parameter.) But from Greenberg's original 
paper (Greenberg 1966) onwards, most typologists have adopted a model 
in which both single-order preferences (Greenberg's 'dominance') and 
linkages (Greenberg's 'harmony') compete with each other and jointly 
determine patterns of word order variation, as Matthew noted in his 
last post. This can be demonstrated statistically: Justeson and 
Stephens (1990) did a log-linear analysis on a large synchronic 
language sample and showed that the best-fit model included both 
dominance and harmony factors. I presume there is a dynamic 
equivalent of log-linear analysis that could be used to test the 
model that most typologists accept.

Regarding the issue of lineage-specific vs. universal patterns: Keith 
Poole and I had to deal with a similar question in using 
multidimensional scaling to find universals of grammatical categories 
(Croft and Poole 2008). There, the contrast was between 
language-specific MDS models (as used, for example, by Barbara Malt 
and her colleagues) and crosslinguistic MDS models. We argued that if 
the regularities were culture-specific, then mixing in languages with 
culturally-specific category structures would reduce the goodness of 
fit of the MDS model; but if the regularities were crosslinguistic 
(i.e. universal), then mixing together languages would improve the 
goodness of fit of the model. (We found the latter.) The same 
presumably would apply for word order patterns, mutatis mutandis. But 
here the problem with the Dunn et al. result is that they test only 
four lineages, representing only 7.5% of language genera (low-level 
language families) in the world; the other 92.5% of language genera 
occur in other lineages. Also, for many of the pairwise correlations 
they test, including the two illustrated in their article, Bantu is 
too shallow a family to exhibit any variation; and for the two 
illustrated in their article, even in the other families very few 
branches undergo a word order shift. So the empirical sample, though 
well distributed geographically, is very small and has few 
independent changes to evaluate. And here we hit a problem that all 
researchers on language universals hit: our uncertainty about 
language phylogeny in most parts of the world, especially for deeper 
families, but even for subgrouping in accepted families. In this 
latter area, quantitative methods are also being applied; but that is 
another story.

I think typologists should welcome this effort to marry phylogeny and 
typology, even if we remain unconvinced of the particular result in 
this paper.

Bill


Croft, William and Keith T. Poole. 2008. Inferring universals from 
grammatical variation: multidimensional scaling for typological 
analysis. Theoretical Linguistics 34.1-37.

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Some universals of grammar with particular 
reference to the order of meaningful elements. Universals of Grammar, 
ed. Joseph H. Greenberg, 2nd edition, 73-113. Cambridge, Mass: MIT 
Press

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1978. Diachrony, synchrony and language 
universals. Universals of Human Language, Vol. 1: Method and Theory, 
ed. Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson and Edith A. Moravcsik, 
61-92. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Maslova, Elena. 2000. A dynamic approach to the verification of 
distributional universals. Linguistic Typology 4.307-33.
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