[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Guillaume Jacques]

Dear Randy,

I’ve heard from all of the authors whose papers I reviewed arguments why
> what they are doing is not lexicostatistics, but it is using counts of
> supposed cognates to determine language relatedness.
>
> The common point that (most) studies on linguistic phylogenies share with
lexicostatistics is the fact that lists of cognates are used to infer
phylogenies, as opposed to sound changes, morphology or structural
features, and that etyma belonging to "basic vocabulary" are less likely to
have been borrowed. Do you think that the other alternatives are preferable?

Concerning the methods themselves, they are not based on "counts" (Bayesian
phylogenies are not distance-based methods). Also, in our 2019 article that
you mention, we also used Traitslab (a program implementing the stochastic
Dollo model) in addition to Beast. Unlike Zhang's article we identified and
excluded loanwords from Chinese and Tibetan.



> That is clearly lexicostatistics, and in my view clearly problematic, as
> my experience in doing fieldwork is that you cannot say a variety does not
> have a form (when I worked on Tarung (Dulong), I had a list of supposed
> lexical differences between three varieties created by another scholar—the
> same scholar whose lexical list you used in your study, but I did more
> extensive fieldwork, and found all three varieties had all of the forms—it
> is like if I ask an American what I am wearing on my lower body, and they
> say “pants”, whereas if you ask a Brit they may say “trousers”, but that
> doesn’t mean the Americans don’t have “trousers”, and the Brits don’t have
> “pants”, but “trousers” is less common in the US and in the case of “pants"
> in Britain, the meaning is limited to what in the US we call “underpants"),
> and many of the studies vary in terms of what they count as cognates, as
> yours did compared to Matisoff’s STEDT. The modern studies seem to be
> different because somehow using a computer makes them more legitimate.
>
>
I completely agree with you, and this is exactly why most studies on
linguistic phylogenies allow polymorphism.

Guillaume
-- 
Guillaume Jacques

Directeur de recherches
CNRS (CRLAO) - EPHE- INALCO
https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=1XCp2-oAAAAJ&hl=fr
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
<http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques>
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231103/52e88a7a/attachment.htm>