Atkinson on phoneme inventories in Science

[Gideon Goldenberg]

Just a couple of queries: (1) Looking in the WALS at the maps that show the distribution of Consonant Inventories and Vowel Quality Inventories according to theis sizes, may one ask how come that nothing like a correlation between size of phoneme inventory and distance from Africa can be detected? (2) How the size of the population of a speech community is measured? Is, eg, the German speaking people one speech community, or the speakers of Arabic dialects, not to mention prehistoric African dialectology? Other questions may wait, including the question of the size of prehistoric communities in general.
Gideon.

On 19 Apr 2011, at 6:21, Bill Croft wrote:

> Atkinson argues for the existence of two correlations in a global sample of phoneme inventories: a correlation between size of phoneme inventory and distance from Africa, and a correlation between size of phoneme inventory and size of the population of the speech community. Atkinson needs the latter, phoneme-population correlation to justify his founder-effect explanation for the former correlation. The phoneme-population correlation was also identified by Hay and Bauer (2007). (Hay and Bauer also test Pericliev's [2004] data and found, pace Pericliev, that the correlation is also strong in his sample [Hay and Bauer 2007:397].) Johanna Nichols reports in her post a tentative result from her sample: she reports that the global correlation is present, but a division of the sample into large areas shows that the correlation does not exist, or is even negative, in some of the areas. On this basis, Johanna writes, "If there is really a correlation between population size and phoneme inventory size (or anything else), it should hold within areas as well as worldwide." She concludes that the global phoneme-population correlation is an artifact of population sizes in Eurasia and Africa, and areality in Africa plus neighboring regions.
> 
> Interestingly, with Dunn et al., the shoe is on the other foot with respect to global correlations and correlations in subpopulations. Here it is Dunn et al. who argue against the global word-order correlations manifested in Greenbergian word order universals. Dunn et al. argue that a correlation between various pairs of word orders are supported in some language families but not others. Hence word-order correlations are lineage-specific (and culture-specific) rather than universal in the Greenbergian sense. Dunn et al. divide the global sample into phylogenetic subpopulations rather than areal subpopulations, but the point is the same. (There are two differences between Dunn et al.'s analysis and the Greenberg universals: the Greenberg universals are synchronic, while Dunn et al's data is a sample of diachronic word order changes; and the model that Dunn et al. tests is not the model implied by Greenbergian universals. While these differences are important, as I argued in my post on their paper, I believe they aren't relevant to the point being made here.) And in the case of Dunn et al., Matthew Dryer argued in a post that the lineage-specific correlations are random effects and the globally identified Greenbergian word-order correlations are real.
> 
> I asked a couple of physicists with whom I collaborate about what to think of global correlations when those correlations are not found in most or all of the subpopulations that the data may be partitioned into (areal, phylogenetic, etc.). They both stated that a global correlation is statistically valid even if the same correlation does not exist in all the partitioned subpopulations. This situation may arise when negative correlations or noncorrelations in some subpopulations are more than compensated for by positive correlations in other subpopulations, so that the global effect is a positive correlation. (One of them further added that another possible reason is that the subpopulation samples may be too small to provide a significant correlation one way or the other.) When pressed further about why a global correlation would not lead to the same correlations in (large enough) subpopulations, the response was that, in the simplest case, X is dependent not only on Y but also on a factor Z that varies considerably from subpopulation to subpopulation; and that one would expect the same correlations in the subpopulations if and only if most of the observed variation in X is due to Y. In fact, this is not the case for the phoneme-population correlation: Atkinson shows that language family membership, which clearly varies by region, accounts for the greatest amount of variance for phoneme inventory size. But the other correlations still hold globally when combined with this factor (Atkinson, supplementary materials, pp. 5-6). So it appears that the global phoneme-population and word-order correlations are valid, that is, there is a factor (or factors) Y that needs to be accounted for; but there is apparently also a factor or factors Z that lead to areal- and/or phylogeny-specific differences in the linguistic patterns.
> 
> Of course, correlation is not causation, as we all know. We have to find an explanatory framework that allows us to say that when X correlates with Y (and Z), there is a causal connection between X and Y (and Z). One problem with the global phoneme-population correlation is that there is no satisfactory explanation for it: even the linguists who found the correlation have only a few suggestions that they do not consider to be strong enough to offer as an explanation. Conversely, there is no obvious explanation why word-order correlations might be lineage- or culture-specific. For example, no cultural reason easily comes to mind why Proto-Indo-Europeans and their descendants couple verb-object and adposition-noun order, but Proto-Uto-Aztecans and their descendants do not. Nor is there an obvious culture-specific nonlinguistic behavior that might be causally connected to word-order patterns in the way that spatial cognition has been shown to be connected to linguistic spatial frames of reference by Levinson and his colleagues.
> 
> Bill
> 
> Hay, Jennifer and Laurie Bauer. 2007. Phoneme inventory size and population size. Language 83.388-400.
> 
> Pericliev, Vladimir. 2004. There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language. Linguistic Typology 8.376-83.

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