[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

[Heath Jeffrey]

T Givon argued in a couple of places starting with "On understanding grammar" (1979) that the current prevalence of SOV languages is a retention from proto-human, on the grounds that a) there is a roadmap from pre-human communication to SOV order, and b) in well-developed languages, it is easy to shift away from SOV but difficult to shift to it. That was when it was generally thought that modern human language had been around for only 50,000 to 100,000 years, prior to recent discoveries involving Neandertals that greatly push back the time frame.

Others who have argued recently for linguistic fossils from the earliest human speech, but not in a specifically typological framework, include John Haiman (ideophones) and Liljana Progovac (syntax). The converse is the argument that widespread current features, such as labiodental fricatives or general complexification, are due to more recent cultural developments.

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Ian Maddieson <ianm at berkeley.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2020 4:04 PM
To: Harald Hammarström <harald at bombo.se>
Cc: LINGTYP LINGTYP <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

Bernard Comrie comes pretty close to suggesting something of the sort that Martin asks about in his 1992 paper cited below.
For example, the universal that "no language has only nasalized vowels" (or "all languages have oral vowels”) is
attributed to there being a sole historical source of nasalized vowels from a sequence of a vowel plus a nasal (either order).
While Proto-World is not given explicitly a role here, the implication that all proto-languages — projected back far
enough in time — had only oral vowels comes pretty close.
________________________________
Comrie, B. 1992: Before complexity. In Hawkins, J.A. and Gell-Mann, M. , editors, The evolution of human languages, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity XI, Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley , 193–211
Ian Maddieson

On Jan 20, 2020, at 12:04, Harald Hammarström <harald at bombo.se<mailto:harald at bombo.se>> wrote:

Re basic constituent order argued to be (partly) the reflection of proto-world SOV, see:

Gell-Mann, Murray & Merritt Ruhlen. 2011. The origin and evolution of
word order. PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America 108(42). 17290-17295.

Maurits, Luke & Thomas L. Gri?ths. 2014. Tracing the roots of syntax
with Bayesian phylogenetics. PNAS 111(37). 13576?13581.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2000. On the reconstruction of 'Proto-World' word
order. In Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R. Hurford
(eds.), The evolutionary emergence of language: social function and the
origins of linguistic form, 372-390. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.



Pada tanggal Sen, 20 Jan 2020 pukul 18.45 Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> menulis:
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<mailto: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

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Ian Maddieson

Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
MSC03-2130
Albuquerque NM 87131-0001




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