[Lingtyp] Probabilistic typology vs. typology-based grammatical theory

[Matthew Dryer]

Matthew writes: "The rara are relevant to typological work in that they 
are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do 
things, and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical 
importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical 
goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is 
primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."I think 
this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena 
Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all 
sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more 
frequent patterns are somehow "better" than rare ones is a logical 
mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have 
happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as 
argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare 
and what is common might have well changed during the last millenia due 
to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say 
that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, 
and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about frequencies 
of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't 
bias us.Best,Peter

I have devoted considerable effort in my published research discussing 
the problem that Peter describes, showing how it is often the case that 
a particular language type may be more frequent for nonlinguistic 
reasons and proposing ways to factor out these nonlinguistic factors. 
Thus what I mean by “dominant” does not mean more frequent, but more 
frequent for what are apparently linguistic reasons.

Matthew


On 1/26/16 7:10 AM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
> Matthew writes:
> "The rara are relevant to typological work in that they are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things, and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."
>
> I think this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow "better" than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common might have well changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about frequencies of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.
>
> Best,
>
> Peter

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