[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

Tue Jan 21 10:24:03 UTC 2020

Dear Colleagues

In connection with this, you might be interested in the attached article where I argue that the old battlefield of 'monogenesis vs polygenesis' should be reconceptualised to one of 'polysemigenesis', where language arose by putting together various semi-languages, developed in separate places, and pooling their 'inventions' in a multilingual environment. That has obvious consequences for Martin's question.

Best, Nick Evans
________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Ian Maddieson <ianm at berkeley.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 12:50 PM
To: David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

I agree with David that monogenesis of human language is unlikely for various reasons, but I think Martin’s
original question had to do with whether an argument had been presented in the linguistic literature with the
specific form of claiming that a universal exists because it was in the prototype of all languages. An argument
of this basic form could be made without assuming monogenesis if the hypothesis was that each episode of 'language
creation' started in similar ways.

Ian

On Jan 20, 2020, at 18:23, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

Dear all,

I'm not sure whether Martin is looking for such cases in order to cite them favourably or shoot them down, but either way ...

The kind of proposal that Martin mentions presupposes the existence of a single Proto-World, aka monogenesis, of a similar degree of complexity to contemporary human languages, the latter condition being necessary in order for it to be possible to meaningfully attribute a particular universal feature of contemporary human languages to such a hypothetical proto-language.

However, the monogenesis hypothesis is more consistent with the saltational view of language evolution espoused primarily within generative grammar, than it is with alternative views of language evolution that would characterize it as the outcome of gradual processes that began before the rise of modern Homo Sapiens.  Under the latter view, modern languages could be traced back in a continuous path to various rudimentary "proto-languages" of the kind more likely to have arisen independently in multiple times and places.

Also, it's not clear to me how strict monogenesis can be reconciled with recent genetic discoveries suggesting that there was admixture between modern (linguistically-endowed) humans and Denisovans as recently as 15,000 years ago in New Guinea.  While not a logical necessity, it's extremely likely that there was some kind of inter-species communication going on, and such communication could, potentially, have left traces still observable in modern human languages.

David

On 20/01/2020 19:45, Haspelmath, Martin 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<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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David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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Ian Maddieson

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

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