[Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all

[Martin Haspelmath]

Many thanks, Gerhard, for these clarifications. Clearly I didn't 
understand your article well enough, as I lack the mathematical 
background. But I was glad to see your clarification about the 
relationship between your method and stratified sampling:

On 06.11.23 08:23, Gerhard Jäger wrote:
> In the extreme case where each family contains just one language in a 
> sample, the Jäger & Wahle method is actually equivalent to stratified 
> sampling where one language is sampled from each family. So our method 
> is not so much an alternative to stratified sampling but an extension 
> that allows to use all languages for which you have data.

So does the advantage boil down, then, to situations where a lot of 
extra data is available, as with WALS (which was used by Jäger & Wahle) 
and Grambank (used by Verkerk et al.)?

Suppose I want to study a phenomenon that no large-scale worldwide 
research has been done on yet, e.g. concessive conditional clauses (Tom 
Bossuyt's recent article goes beyond Europe, building on Haspelmath & 
König 1998, but covers only 17 non-European languages: 
https://benjamins.com/catalog/sl.20068.bos).

So if I have funding only for studying a hundred languages, could I 
study 100 languages from 100 different Glottolog families and get 
results that would be about as good as studying 1500 languages from 100 
families? The research would be at least 15 times cheaper, so funding 
agencies might be very interested in the answer to this question.

I've often seen the argument that we shouldn't "throw away data", and 
that the sampling method forces us to do that. But that argument applies 
only to situations where a lot of data is already available. In the case 
of concessive conditionals, if we decided to collect data on 1500 
languages, we might be "throwing away money", because very similar 
results could perhaps be obtained much more cheaply.

Best,

Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/