21.05.2024 - Annemarie Verkerk

Typology abounds with functional proposals for marked distributions of features. For example, word order universals have been claimed to be rooted in principles that have to do with ease of processing: associated heads and dependents are favored to be close together and branch in the same direction (Futrell et al. 2015, Hahn et al. 2020). Another example is morphological complexity, especially in the domain of argument marking: most languages do not have fixed word order, case marking, and verb agreement at the same time. Rather, these alternatives are in at least a partial complementary distribution (Sinnemäki 2010, Levshina 2011), suggesting a tendency to avoid redundancy and be 'economical'.

While these claims hold, what is mostly unclear is how these distributions arise. Some universals have been said to be 'historical accidents' (Collins 2019), for some we are quite sure that they are rooted in language change (grammaticalization pathways, Dryer 2019), yet others may result from some sort of 'selection' (Givón 2010). In this talk, I propose a roadmap for investigating these types of explanations in a joint framework.

Collins, J. (2019). Some language universals are historical accidents. In K. Schmidtke-Bode, N. Levshina, S. M. Michaelis, & I. A. Seržant (Eds.), Explanation in Typology: Diachronic Sources, Functional Motivations and the Nature of the Evidence. Language Science Press.

Dryer, M. S. (2019). Grammaticalization accounts of word order correlations. In K. Schmidtke-Bode, N. Levshina, S. Michaelis, & I. A. Seržant (Eds.), Explanation in typology: Diachronic sources, functional motivations and the nature of the evidence (pp. 63–95). Language Science Press.

Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Gibson, E. (2015). Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33), 10336–10341.

Givón, T. 2010. The adaptive approach to grammar. In Heine, Bernd & Narrog, Heiko (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 27–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hahn, M., Jurafsky, D., & Futrell, R. (2020). Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(5), 2347–2353.

Levshina, N. (2021). Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 648200.

Sinnemäki, K. (2010). Word order in zero-marking languages. Studies in Language, 34(4), 869–912.