[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Matías Guzmán Naranjo]

Hi Martin,

why not simply be much more skeptical about all results? not just those in
high prestige journals or those using fancy stats?
I don't think you're pessimistic enough. I don't believe we can have much
certainty about our results.

Best,

El jue, 2 nov 2023 a las 15:22, Martin Haspelmath (<
martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>) escribió:

> Dear all,
>
> Twelve years ago, for the first (and so far last) time, typology made it
> into *Nature*, and *BBC Online* reported at the time: “A long-standing
> idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by
> human brain structure has been cast into doubt.” (
> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13049700). Our journal *Linguistic
> Typology* took this as an opportunity to publish a “Universals Debate”
> taking up 200 pages (
> https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lity.2011.023/html).
> Younger LINGTYP readers may not remember all this, but a lot of stir was
> caused at the time by the paper by Dunn et al. (2011), which claimed that
> "systematic linkages of traits are likely to be the rare exception rather
> than the rule. Linguistic diversity does not seem to be tightly constrained
> by universal cognitive factors“ (
> https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09923). Their paper argued not only
> against Chomskyan UG (universal grammar), but also against the Greenbergian
> word order universals (Dryer 1992).
>
> In the meantime, however, it has become clear that those surprising claims
> about word order universals are not supported – the sample size (four
> language families) used in their paper was much too small.
>
> Much less prominently, Jäger & Wahle (2021) reexamined those claims (using
> similar methods, but many more language families and all relevant *WALS*
> data), finding “statistical evidence for 13 word order features, which
> largely confirm the findings of traditional typological research” (
> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.682132/full).
>
> Similarly, Annemarie Verkerk and colleagues (including Russell Gray) have
> recently reexamined a substantial number of claimed universals on the basis
> of the much larger Grambank database and found that especially Greenberg’s
> word order universals hold up quite well (see Verkerk’s talk at the recent
> Grambank workshop at MPI-EVA:
> https://www.eva.mpg.de/de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/events/2023-grambank-workshop/,
> available on YouTube:
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSqqgRcaL9yl8FNW_wb8tDIzz9R78t8Uk).
>
> So what went wrong in 2011? We are used to paying a lot of attention to
> the “big journals” (*Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell*), but they often focus
> on sensationalist claims, and they typically publish less reliable results
> than average journals (see Brembs 2018:
> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full).
>
> So maybe we should be extra skeptical when a paper is published in a
> high-prestige journal. But another question that I have is: Why didn’t the
> authors see that their 2011 results were unlikely to be true, and that
> their sample size was much too small? Why didn't they notice that most of
> the word order changes in their four families were contact-induced? Were
> they so convinced that their new mathematical method (adopted from
> computational biology) would yield correct results that they neglected to
> pay sufficient attention to the data? Would it have helped if they had
> submitted their paper to a linguistics journal?
>
> Perhaps I’m too pessimistic (see also this blogpost:
> https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2368), but in any event, I think that this
> intriguing episode (and sobering experience) should be discussed among
> typologists, and we should learn from it, in one way or another. Advanced
> quantitative methods are now everywhere in science, and it seems that they
> are often misapplied or misunderstood (see also this recent blogpost by
> Richard McElreath:
> https://elevanth.org/blog/2023/06/13/science-and-the-dumpster-fire/).
>
> Martin
>
> --
> Martin Haspelmath
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6
> D-04103 Leipzighttps://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
>
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>


-- 
Dr. Matías Guzmán Naranjo
Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
https://mguzmann89.gitlab.io/
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