Re: THEORY: two questions

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of Matt Pearson
> Sent: 27 March 2000 16:40
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: THEORY: two questions
>
>
> >On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Matt Pearson wrote:
> >
> >> A colleague of mine and I here in the linguistics department were racking
> >> our brains about this one, and as far as we could determine, based on our
> >> collective knowledge of the world's languages, there's no significant
> >> correlation.  I can think of at least one head-marking and one dependent-
> >> marking language for each word order type:
> >>
> >> Verb-initial, head-marking:     Marshallese, Chamorro (?)
> >> Verb-initial, dep-marking:      Tagalog, Polynesian lgs
> >> Verb-medial, head-marking:      Swahili, Mohawk
> >> Verb-medial, dep-marking:       Russian
> >> Verb-final, head-marking:       Lakhota, many Papuan lgs
> >> Verb-final, dep-marking:        Japanese, Yidiny
> >>
> >> So I guess you have your choice...
> >
> >Indeed. While there are examples of each, Nichols claims to show
> >that there is in fact a statistical correlation between verb-
> >initial languages and head marking. Though some have questioned
> >the reliability of her conclusions ...
>
> Your response raises a deeper question, which is:  What is the
> significance [no pun intended] of statistical tendencies in linguistics?
> Are typological correlations like the one Nichols observes merely
> historical accidents, or do they reveal something fundamental
> about the structure of language which linguistic theory needs to
> account for?  My personal bias is to ignore such tendencies, even
> statistically significant ones.  Since the goal of generative linguistics
> is supposedly to answer the question "What is a possible human
> language?", I'm inclined to focus on features of language which
> *always* occur, or *never* occur, and to disregard those features
> which *usually* occur, or *almost never* occur.  (Of course,
> since our data sample is pitifully small, we can never be completely
> sure that a given feature will always occur, or never occur, but
> we do the best we can.)
>
> And yet, it is intriguing that certain typological features appear
> to be highly common (but not universal), while other features appear
> to be extremely rare (but not unattested).  What, if anything, are
> we to make of this?  Why, for example, is SOV order commonplace
> while VOS order is relatively rare?  Is this merely an unexplainable
> historical fact, something which could easily have turned out
> otherwise?  Or is it inevitable?  Is Universal Grammar set up
> in such a way that SOV order is somehow 'easier to get' than VOS
> order?  And if SOV order is easier to get than VOS order, then
> why does VOS order occur at all?  As someone with an interest
> in typology, I struggle with these questions all the time...
I'm skeptical that the notions of basic word order and of the equivalence of
notions of O, S and V across languages are anything more than an
impressionistic shorthand for mere usage tendencies within languages and
'family resemblances' between languages.

In my view, typological universals are due to constraints imposed by the
hardware - the implementation of language in the brain - and to functional,
darwinian selectional pressures (languages have to be fit to do their job).
UG does not exist as anything beyond a mere language faculty that imposes no
constraints upon language except those that follow from general properties
of the mind/brain. I should come clean and declare myself to be a rabid
antiempiricist platonist.

Of course, as a believer in UG, you have a harder time, and indeed, coping
with differences between languages has been and continues to be the Achilles
heel in Generative Grammar - an ineradiable stain of arbitrariness.

--And.