[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

Fri Nov 3 17:07:32 UTC 2023

May I make one correction: Jaeger and Wahle's (2021) source of data was
WALS, not
Grambank.  I was confused because of viewing Jaeger's talk at the recent
Grambank
workshop, which Martin linked to in his post.

On Fri, Nov 3, 2023 at 8:42 AM Joan Bresnan <joan.bresnan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/
>

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