[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Sebastian Nordhoff]

A test:

(1) name one paper which appeared in Linguistic Typology and which was 
really impressive and influenced your thoughts substantially

(2) name one paper which appeared in Language and which was really 
impressive and influenced your thoughts substantially

(3) name one paper which appeared in Nature and which was really 
impressive and influenced your thoughts substantially

My gut reaction to "paper in Nature" is actually "probably bogus and 
overblown; won't read". This is corroborated by the empirical findings 
Martin mentioned. I recommend everybody read the article by Björn Brembs
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full

Best wishes
Sebastian




On 11/2/23 15:21, Martin Haspelmath 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
> 
> 
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