[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

[Bohnemeyer, Juergen]

Dear Martin — I’m surprised you didn’t mention Atkinson 2011, the proposed (and intensely argued-against) founder effect on phoneme inventory complexity. 

Also, I remember Leon Stassen giving a talk in the late 90s in which he argued that if you throw a large set of typological properties in the hopper and look for the broadest clusters, you find two types of languages, which he called 'A-languages' and 'B-languages’. I’m not sure whether he explicitly suggested that these clusters have been inherited from a stage equivalent to Proto-World (on a polygenesis scenario), but that is definitely how I interpreted the talk at the time. However, as far as I know, Leon never published this study. 

Best — Juergen

Atkins, Quentin D. (2011). Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science 332: 346-349.


> On Jan 20, 2020, at 12:45 PM, Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Does anyone know a case where it has been proposed (or suggested) concretely that an observed universal tendency (or absolute universal) is due to inheritance from Proto-World?
> 
> Cysouw (2011: 417) has suggested this as a possibility:
> 
> "It is possible that there are still founder effects available in the current distribution of the world’s languages, i.e., that there are preferences in the current world’s languages that go back to incidental events during the spread of languages over the world (Maslova 2000)."
> 
> But while this is logically possible, are there any concrete suggestions with a global scope?
> Word order universals such as the Greenbergian correlations, or phonological universals such as vowel dispersion cannot be due to Proto-World (or some other founder effect), because the universality lies in the implicational patterns, not in specific structures that all languages share. Has anyone suggested that any other universal properties (e.g. the fact that all languages can express negation or questions, or that agent-patient organization is universal, or that all languages have recursion) may be due to Proto-World inheritance?
> 
> Thanks,
> Martin
> 
> ************
> 
> References:
> Cysouw, Michael. 2011. Understanding transition probabilities. Linguistic Typology 15(2). 415–431.
> Maslova, Elena. 2000. A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals. Linguistic Typology 4. 307 – 333.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Martin Haspelmath (
> haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
> )
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10	
> D-07745 Jena  
> &
> Leipzig University
> Institut fuer Anglistik 
> IPF 141199
> D-04081 Leipzig  
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies 
Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science 
University at Buffalo 

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus * Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 
Phone: (716) 645 0127 
Fax: (716) 645 3825 * Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu * Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/ 

Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm


There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In (Leonard Cohen)