[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

Thu Nov 2 16:36:34 UTC 2023

Dear Ian, Martin, et al. – There are two separate issues here. In no particular order:

  *   Generic science journals have begun to publish articles with typological content. That’s not going to change, so there’s little use in us wishing or demanding that typologists (and notably anyone doing typological research, as many of the authors in question aren’t actually typologists) publish only in linguistics journals or at least cognitive science journals. However. The problem with the generic science journals is that they typically either don’t bother to recruit trained linguists (let alone typologists) as reviewers for the manuscripts in question, or else the review process they rely on is structured in such a way that the manuscript is unlikely to be reviewed by a typologist. It’s my understanding that these journals tend to rely on a largish number of associate editors, who are of course recruited from the fields that publish most frequently in the journals. These AEs are most likely to funnel manuscripts to reviewers they know, and neither the AEs nor anyone they know is likely to be a linguist, let alone a typologist. How do we address this problem? What, for example, if ALT were to write a letter, signed by as many members as we can gather signatures from, address to the editorial boards of the journals in question, to make them aware of the problem and suggest some colleagues who would volunteer as consultants for AEs in search of a reviewer for a manuscript with typological content?

  *   Turning to Dunn et al., I think I have been as critical of that article as anybody, yet I’m prepared to partially defend it here (and accept the flak I’m doubtlessly going to get for that 😊). Yes, by restricting the investigation to just four large language families, the article became woefully inadequate to the goal of testing the Greenbergian generalizations. But what really turned this limitation into a significant flaw that arguably should have prevented the article from getting published in the form in which it was is that it way oversold its findings. The article should have been a methods paper, with a narrative along the lines of “Here’s a new way of testing typological generalizations, by looking, instead of at a stratified sample of languages to see whether the features in question co-occur with statistically significant probability, at phylogenies to see whether those features tend to co-evolve in lineage-specific ways.” Of course, as a methods paper, the article would have been much less likely to get published in Nature.  Now, why was that study restricted to those four phylogenies? Because back then, with Grambank not even having been conceived yet (as far as I know), that was pretty much the limit of what was feasible. Yes, the authors could have looked at a larger sample of smaller phylogenies – but that would have required some form of stratified sampling, which the authors presumably wanted to avoid 😉

Meanwhile, though, Dunn et al. (2011) still has a number of merits to its credit IMO:

     *   It reintroduced the community of typologists to the idea that hypothetical typological generalizations ought to be tested not only synchronically, but also diachronically. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had not even been aware of Maslova (2000), and might have entirely missed this groundbreaking paper if the controversy over Dunn et al. hadn’t brought it to my attention (although Dunn et al. unfortunately failed to cite Maslova).
     *   I think it played an important part in making the case for Grambank. The effort that went into Grambank is awe-inspiring from where I look at it, and Dunn et al. provides a straightforward justification for it, especially if one accepts that looking at just four large language families will inevitably render any test of typological generalizations invalid.
     *   And of course it brought typology to the attention of a much broader scientific audience. Yes, it did so with an unwarranted attack on its established research methods. But it still has the merit of having raised awareness for the questions typologists deal with.

For these reasons, I have actually come to see Dunn et al. (2011) as a net-positive.

Best – Juergen

Maslova, E. (2000). A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals. Linguistic Typology 4: 307-333.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Ian Joo <ian_joo at nucba.ac.jp>
Date: Thursday, November 2, 2023 at 15:53
To: <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all
Dear Martin,

Another recent example of a controversial linguistic paper making it into Nature was Robbeets et al’s (2021) Transeurasian (Altaic) paper.
The single paper made a claim based on data from three disciplines and - while I cannot speak for the genetics and archaeology - the linguistic data was available only as an online appendix rather than being scrutinized within the article. And it did not, as argued by Tian et al. (2022), meet the scholarly standards a typical linguistic journal would expect. Despite these problems, being published in Nature itself gave it wide media coverage all over the world.
So I wholly agree that a paper should prove its quality in the journal of its own discipline and not in a general science journal. Only after having passed that step can it present itself to the wider audience of scientists from all fields.

From Japan,
Ian

- - - - -
JOO, IAN 朱易安
Lecturer 助教
Faculty of International Studies 国際学部
Nagoya University of Commerce and Business 名古屋商科大学
Nisshin, Aichi, Japan 愛知県日進市
https://ianjoo.github.io
- - - - -

2/11/2023 오후 11:21, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de> 작성:

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

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Martin Haspelmath

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Deutscher Platz 6

D-04103 Leipzig

https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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