[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

Fri Nov 3 15:42:10 UTC 2023

Martin, Thank you for bringing attention to the new work by Jaeger & Wahle
(2021) that confirms many of the findings of
Greenberg's typological universals, against the opposite findings of the
previous study published in *Nature* by Dunn et al (2011), which
attracted much attention.

You ask "What went wrong in 2011" and express "pessimism" about
publications based on advanced quantitative methods and about
the reliability of "big journals" (e.g. *Nature, Science*,* PNAS*).  Many
responses to your post also express pessimism and negative reflections
on the state of science and academia.

As an outsider to typology, I wish to suggest an opposite question.  What
went right?  First, Jaeger and Wahle (2021)
adopted a theoretical approach originally published in *Linguistic Typology*
well before the 2011 Dunn et all paper but previously not widely used.
They (Jaeger and Wahle) write, "In a seminal paper, Maslova (2000) proposes
an entirely different conceptual take on the problems of typological
generalizations and typological sampling...."
Second, Jaeger and Wahle's source of data was Grambank, a new open access
data bank of typological variation in the world's languages, fostering
major empirical advances in the study of language evolution---this new
finding is one such advance.  Third, Jaeger and Wahle's methods are
themselves open access: their code is
available online and their results can be replicated at
https://github.com/gerhardJaeger/phylogeneticTypology.
Such open access, reproducible work is the gold standard of contemporary
science.   The fact that it has confirmed so much of previous
Greenbergian work on typology is remarkable and should be celebrated.

In my view, the appropriate response is to submit these new findings  to
*Nature* and/or other "big journals" to inform the scientific public and
correct the previous record.

Your posting is one step in this direction.

Thank you!

Joan

On Thu, Nov 2, 2023 at 7:22 AM 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 Leipzighttps://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
>
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>

-- 
Joan Bresnan
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~bresnan/
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