Complementing quantitative typology with behavioral approaches: Evidence for typological universals

Abstract

Two main classes of theory have been advanced to explain correlations between linguistic features like those observed by Greenberg (1963). arbitrary constraint theories argue that certain sets of features patterm together because they have a single underlying cause in the innate language faculty (e.g., the Principles and Parameters program; see Chomsky & Lasnik 1993). functional theories argue that languages are less likely to have certain combinations of properties because, although possible in principle, they are harder to learn or to process, or less suitable for efficient communication (Hockett 1960, Bates & MacWhinney 1989, Hawkins 2004, Dryer 2007, Christiansen & Chater 2008; for further discussion see Hawkins 2007 and Jaeger & Tily 2011). The failure of Dunn, Greenhill, Levinson & Gray (2011) to find systematic feature correlations using their novel computational phylogenetic methods calls into question both of these classes of theory. Dunn et al.’s methodology is a principled and powerful new way of evaluating change-based theories of language typology, but it faces fundamental challenges common throughout quantitative typology. Typological data is usually sparse, and additional data hard or impossible to obtain. The statistical power to detect an effect (e.g., to detect universal tendencies) is reduced by uncertainty about the genealogical relations between languages, the period of time during which a language was spoken, and the amount of contact with other languages. It is hence possible that the failure to find support for word order universals reported in Dunn et al. 2011 is a spurious null effect (see Croft et al. 2011, in this issue, who also discuss other potential methodological issues with that study). To some extent, this is a critique that can be leveled at much work on quantitative typology: sparse and uncertain data weakens the conclusions that can be drawn from it. If we desire a higher level of certainty when evaluatAUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.