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...

Matt.