[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

[Claire Bowern]

A note on terminology: a founder effect is a bottleneck - a subsample
extraction from a larger population. It's hard to see how Proto-world is
that. It's not the same thing as a small number of initial speakers that
have not been sampled from a larger population of language users.
Claire

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 5:26 PM Peter Bakker <linpb at cc.au.dk> wrote:

> Dear Martin and all,
>
>
> I think it was in this book from 2007:
>
> The Genesis of Grammar A Reconstruction *Bernd Heine* and *Tania Kuteva*
>
> that Heine & Kuteva used grammaticalisation to reconstruct a kind of
> Proto-World. For instance, simplified, we know that all (etymologizable)
> adpositions in the languages of the world are derived from either nouns or
> (serial) verbs, therefore the original language had nouns and verbs. It is
> a while ago that I read the book, but I think that was one of the points
> they made.
>
> Peter Bakker
>
> ------------------------------
> *Fra:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> på vegne af
> Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
> *Sendt:* 20. januar 2020 18:45
> *Til:* LINGTYP LINGTYP <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
> *Emne:* [Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals
>
> 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
>
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