[Lingtyp] [Extern] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

Fri Nov 3 13:53:13 UTC 2023

Dear all,

I am very sympathetic to what Matías said. I also think that the problem 
is not about decreasing quality of big claims. Well, people try their 
best to move forward and sometimes they fail, also because they 
inadvertantly were inaccurate in one way or another. But maybe this is 
all just normal science. Who is perfect?

What is really annoying, I find, is that we force ourselves and are 
forced by funding bodies, search committees, etc., to do "high prestige" 
stuff and apply for "high prestige" fundings where prestige doesn't seem 
to correlate with quality but simply represents in one way or another a 
botlleneck (e.g. the less money a funding body has to distribute the 
more prestiguous it is, it claims, to get this money).  Perhaps we 
should somehow resist the concept of prestige in science.

Best,

Ilja

Am 02.11.2023 um 15:21 schrieb Martin Haspelmath:
>
> 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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-- 
Prof. Ilja A. Seržant, dr., habil.
Chair Slavic linguistics, head of the dept
Department of Slavonic Studies
University of Potsdam
Am Neuen Palais 10, Haus 01, D-14469 Potsdam
Tel. + 49 331 977 4152; Room 1.1.2.06
URL:https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/slavische-linguistik/team/serzant
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