[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Randy LaPolla]

Hi Martin and all,
Over the years I have been asked by Nature to review a number of these papers that use a  Bayesian-based algorithm (usually the same exact one)—there has been a fad of such papers, and my response is almost always the same: they have used a method (lexicostatistics) long ago discredited in linguistics, but sometimes come up with results quite similar to the results found by more empirical traditional studies. As their valid  results are never new, the only thing worth mentioning is the methodology, as Jürgen pointed out. The methodology fails sometimes, though, and there are two crucial aspects why it does: the only thing that varies among all these studies is what database they use and how they set the priors, which can greatly bias the outcome. The one such study I supported was by Zhang Menghan et al. in 2019, as it used a very reliable database (Matisoff’s Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus—developed over 30 years) and did not set any priors that would have biased the outcome. Most of the others use problematic datasets, and as the old saying goes, Garbage in, garbage out. 

Randy 

> On Nov 2, 2023, at 22:22, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 Leipzig
> https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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