Re: THEORY: two questions

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Matt Pearson wrote:

> >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?
What I gathered to be the point of Nichols' book (or at least
one point) is to emphasize the typological perspective on the
similarity between languages. It seems to have been written as
an indirect response to the "super-groupers"--those who would
like to create language families like "Amerind" or "Nostratic".
Since much of that work rests on typology as well as hard-core
reconstruction (and, as some critics would have it, wishful
thinking), Nichols' purpose seems to be to provide another
way to think about the typological facts. That is, the
predominance of head-marking in the languages of the Northwest
Coast isn't necessarily the result of genetic relatedness, &c.

> 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.)
I see Nichols' research program as being orthogonal to the
generative enterprise. Speaking personally, it's nice to step
back once in a while from examining the bark of my tree (Gosiute
Shoshone phonology) to see the typological forest out there, and
to read about how forests grow. As for what it says about UG,
who knows? I don't.

> 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...
Yes, I know what you mean. Many of these kinds of questions seem
to be addressed in functionalist literature. The functionalist
explanation for these kinds of facts don't preclude UG, though
(or do they?), and I find many functionalist arguments extremely
compelling in phonology. I don't know enough about syntax to
have a clear opinion, but I suspect that of the range of
possible human languages (WRT word order anyway), there is some
winnowing done by functional principles which might lead to this
kind of skewing.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu