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

Tue Jan 26 14:57:24 UTC 2016

There was a nice conference on rara and rarissma at the MPI Leipzig some years ago that discusses these issues in depth.

I certainly agree with Larry that the phonological example here doesn’t belong. Something like the unique sounds in the Amazon might. Peter Ladefoged and I wrote on this years ago: http://www.jstor.org/stable/416103?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Dan
On Jan 26, 2016, at 9:52 AM, Larry M. HYMAN <hyman at berkeley.edu<mailto:hyman at berkeley.edu>> wrote:

I've been sitting quietly through all of these exchanges, but now that phonology is prominently cited in Eitan's message, I have to comment that I don't think that closed syllables belong in the table. Everyone agrees that open syllables are universal, there's no language without them, but closed syllables are not rara in the way the other cited examples are. Perhaps languages that have them are in the minority (has anyone done a count?), and there are languages which have many more open syllables than closed, but there are natural pathways to obtain closed syllables that are quite frequent, especially syncope. Some languages allow closed syllables only word-finally; others allow them only word-internally. A better example of a phonological rarity is a velar implosive, which appears in only 5 of the 451 languages in the UPSID database. Of course I don't know how infrequent something has to be to be thought of as "rare".

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 6:29 AM, Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il<mailto:eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>> wrote:

Of course, rarity might have all sorts of reasons. In something I recently wrote, I try to list a few types of diachronic sources for cross-linguistic rarity. Here's a small chunk.

For example, (i) a given feature may be (relatively) rare because there are fewer pathways that lead to the feature than away from it. Bybee (2001: 195-197) provides evidence for the argument that there are more open syllables than closed syllables, and only open syllables are (nearly) universal, because new open syllables are constantly being created by regular processes of language change (e.g., coda weakening and loss), while there are fewer processes that lead to closed syllables. Another possibility is that (ii) some rare features may necessitate numerous diachronic ‘steps’ that occur in a certain order in order to develop, as in Harris’ (2008) account of Georgian split case marking or Udi endoclitics. Yet another possibility is that (iii) a certain feature may require rare input structures, as in Grossman et al. (2015), which argues that adverbial subordinator prefixes are rare because they are facilitated by the relatively rare VSO order and case prefixes, and are inhibited by other word orders or case suffixes. Finally, Greenberg (1978) has proposed that (iv) some changes simply may be more frequent than others, a view adopted by Blevins (2009), who states that most languages have coronal segments because coronal maintenance and coronal creation are more frequent than ‘coronal annihilation.’

Type

Factor

Rare feature

Documentation

pathway

Few (vs. many) pathways

closed syllables

many languages

stages

Many (vs. few) stages necessary

endoclitics

Udi (Harris 2008)

source

Rare (vs. common) source construction

adverbial subordinator prefixes

Japhug (Grossman et al. submitted)

type

Rare type of change

coronal annihilation

Northwest Mekeo (Blevins 2009)

Importantly, these types of factors that contribute to cross-linguistic rarity are not mutually exclusive, and all things being equal, one would assume that a feature that is characterized by more of the above factors would be rarer than one that is characterized by fewer of them.

One could also add the controversial possibility of inherent (in)stability of a particular feature.

Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809<tel:%2B972%202%20588%203809>
Fax: +972 2 588 1224<tel:%2B972%202%20588%201224>

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 4:20 PM, Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu<mailto:dryer at buffalo.edu>> 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

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

_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

--
Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director, France-Berkeley Fund
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160126/e07b913d/attachment.htm>