[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

Thu Jan 23 12:24:32 UTC 2020

The idea that structural features within Austronesian change once every
50,000 years is … not strongly supported by the data. To pick on just a
couple of features, the languages attest no agreement on the verb
(Proto-Austronesian), nominative-accusative agreement (Southeast Sulawesi),
just Nominative (various locations)Nominative-Active (Nusa Tenggara Timor),
Stative-Active (Maluku), and then down to none again (Polynesia).
Clausal word order is verb-initial, then SVO, some SOV, more SVO, and more
verb-initial.
Possessive affixes are suffixal, except when they're prefixal, or attached
to separate possessive classifiers.
These aren't features with exceptional turn-over, in this family. Literally
any feature shows so many states that you cannot characterise the family,
phonologically or morphosyntactically (other than a vague tendency to stay
head-initial). This is quite unlike other families, as Donohue and Denham
(to appear) demonstrate.
And the family is less than 50,000 years old (as are all families we know
of, of course), so it's hard to see how "just once about every 50,000 years"
can be advanced as a serious proposal.

A slightly-relevant aside on bottlenecks: the eruption of Mt. Toba ca
75,000 years ago is the (pre)historical event that is most likely relevant.
This was a volcanic event that nearly wiped out life on earth, such
that "today's
humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and
10,000 breeding pairs".

-Mark Donohue

1. Donohue, Mark, and Tim Denham. To appear (2020?). Becoming Austronesian:
mechanisms of language dispersal across Indo-Malaysia. In Antoinette
Schapper, David Gil and John McWhorter, eds, *Austronesian undressed*.
Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

On Thu, 23 Jan 2020 at 22:25, Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
wrote:

> There is an interesting tension between one passage in Evans (2017):
>
> “widespread multilingualism should increase the rates of language change,
> in particular the rate at which new typological features appear.” (Evans
> 2017: 930)
>
> and one passage in Evans & Levinson (2009):
>
> “The structural properties of language change on a near-glacial time
> scale. ... a structural feature within a single large language-family like
> Austronesian changes on average just once about every 50,000 years. What
> that implies is that all the languages we now sample from are within
> structural spitting distance of the ancestral tongue! It is quite
> surprising in this light that typologists have been able to catalogue so
> much linguistic variation.” (Evans & Levinson 2009: 477)
>
> So did prehistoric small languages change fast or slowly?
>
> If they changed as slowly as suggested by Evans & Levinson (and also by
> Michael Cysouw in his recent Lingtyp post), then Proto-World may perhaps
> indeed be responsible for some current distributions (i.e. we may not have
> reached a stationary distribution yet, to use the Maslova/Croft
> terminology).
>
> But if they changed as fast as suggested by Evans (2017) and the (more
> recent?) idea that there was a lot of multilingualism in earlier times,
> then it seems that the Proto-World/bottleneck founder population is not
> relevant for explaining universals (as also suggested by Mark Dingemanse in
> his recent Lingtyp post).
>
> Best,
> Martin
>
> On 23.01.20 05:24, Nicholas Evans wrote:
>
> Sorry all about the missing attachment earlier – must have failed to load
> when I was out bush on a dodgy line. Here it is now. And you'll see that it
> also takes seriously the hybrid origins of language (both speech and
> gesture), with initial contributions from each according to their
> affordances, subsequently transferred across modalities by multilingual
> contact
>
> Best Nick
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Nicholas Evans
> <nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au> <nicholas.evans at anu.edu.au>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 21, 2020 9:24 PM
> *To:* Ian Maddieson <ianm at berkeley.edu> <ianm at berkeley.edu>; David Gil
> <gil at shh.mpg.de> <gil at shh.mpg.de>
> *Cc:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG> <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals
>
> 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>
> <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Ian Maddieson
> <ianm at berkeley.edu> <ianm at berkeley.edu>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 21, 2020 12:50 PM
> *To:* David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> <gil at shh.mpg.de>
> *Cc:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <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 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)
> 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
>
>
>
> --
> 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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> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
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