[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

Fri Nov 3 18:11:15 UTC 2023

Regarding Sebastian Nordhoff's "test", one paper in (3) that has influenced
my thinking a lot is the very same Dunn et al 2011 paper. Not for the
particular results; I was worried at the time about only using transitions
(since highly stable systems that are in accord with the Greenberg
universals won't show up). But I found it thought-provoking for three
reasons. One was about how to seriously engage jointly with Typology and
Historical Linguistics - that is, what types of language dynamics shape
contemporary typological systems. Such dynamics can only be studied in
large language families. Second was about the reasons for results that
differed from Greenberg's. I strongly suspect that different prepositional
behavior in Austronesian, for example, comes from the verb > preposition
reanalysis in many Oceanic languages (as opposed to Noun > Preposition in
some other families). That is, the word order ~ etymology dynamics told us
something about where word order exceptions might arise (and again, how
historical linguistics matters for current typologies). And thirdly,
because such papers let us more straightforwardly embed linguistic
evolution in a broader evolutionary context. Linguistics, after all, is one
very important way of considering the past, but it's not the only way.
So, I'd second Joan's point about thinking about "what went right" along
with "what went wrong". Another way to think about it is that Greenberg's
generalizations suffer from a lack of data, since they originate from on a
core sample of just 30 languages (Dunn et al. have 4 families that together
cover about a third of the world's extant spoken languages, though of
course a smaller subset are used in the trees). They also suffer from a
lack of historical depth. Adding the depth gives a different picture, but
the methods underemphasize stable states. Jaeger and Wahle have a way to
combine the two.
Claire

On Fri, Nov 3, 2023 at 1:11 PM Joan Bresnan <joan.bresnan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Lingtyp mailing list
>>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Joan Bresnan
>> Stanford University
>> http://www.stanford.edu/~bresnan/
>>
>
>
> --
> Joan Bresnan
> Stanford University
> http://www.stanford.edu/~bresnan/
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231103/67e4bbeb/attachment.htm>