Greenbergian universals, diachrony, and statistical analyses

Abstract

In their article “Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trendsin word order universals”, Dunn, Greenhill, Levinson, & Gray present evi-dence purporting to demonstrate that both Chomskyan and Greenbergian lan-guage universals are invalid. In particular, and of most interest to readers ofthis journal, they state “contrary to the Greenbergian generalizations, we showthat most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specificrather than universal tendencies” (Dunn et al. 2011: 79). If this conclusionwere correct, the field of typology would have to change profoundly: Green-bergian universals would no longer exist, and the correlations that typologistshave attempted to explain in terms of semantics, discourse, processing, andother general cognitive or interactional terms would have to be explained in“culture-specific” terms. This conclusion was taken up in the general media aswell as in a number of linguistics electronic discussion lists.Dunn et al.’s analysis merits close attention, for several reasons. Althoughthe method they apply is quite different from the method used by typologists toderivethe Greenbergianuniversalsin the first place,Dunn et al.’s methodis onethat many typologists from Greenberg onward have aimed for. Also, althoughDunn et al. used statistical modeling methods that are unfamiliar to typologistsand difficult to interpret for someone lacking a statistical background, thesemethods hold the promise of allowing for significant progress in typology. Wehope that our commentary will suggest ways for a typologist to evaluate statis-tical analyses such as Dunn et al.’s.We argue in this commentary that certain assumptions made by Dunn andcolleagues in the application of the model pose serious issues in accepting theconclusions, notably the absence of any Type II error analysis to assess the rateof false negatives, the absence of contact effects, and the nature of the phylo-