Amazing stuff!
"... An international team ... used Grambank, the world's most comprehensive database of grammatical features, to test 191 proposed universals across more than 1,700 languages. Traditionally, linguists have attempted to circumvent the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages by sampling widely separated languages.
However, sampling can fail to remove all dependencies, reduce statistical power and does not identify historical pathways. The Bayesian spatio-phylogenetic analyses used by the authors accounted for both the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages—a level of statistical rigor rarely achieved in previous work. ...
The study found strong evidence for patterns involving word order (such as whether verbs precede or follow objects) and hierarchical universals (such as dependencies in which arguments are marked in grammatical agreement). The patterns predicted by the supported universals have evolved repeatedly across the world's languages, suggesting deep-rooted constraints in how humans structure communication. ..."
"To the Point
- Linguistic universals: Of the 191 proposed linguistic universals, about one-third are statistically supported across more than 1,700 languages.
- A wealth of data and state-of-the-art statistical methods: Using Grambank and Bayesian statistical models that control for genealogical and geographic influences, the strongest evidence emerges for patterns of word order and hierarchical agreement.
- Evolutionary framework: The repeated evolution of these patterns suggests there are shared cognitive and communicative constraints, which narrows the search for truly universal features of human language.
..."
From the abstract:
"Human languages show astonishing variety, yet their diversity is constrained by recurring patterns. Linguists have long argued over the extent and causes of these grammatical ‘universals’.
Using Grambank—a comprehensive database of grammatical features across the world’s languages—we tested 191 proposed universals with Bayesian analyses that account for both genealogical descent and geographical proximity.
We find statistical support for about a third of the proposed linguistic universals.
The majority of these concern word order and hierarchical universals: two types that have featured prominently in earlier work.
Evolutionary analyses show that languages tend to change in ways that converge on these preferred patterns.
This suggests that, despite the vast design space of possible grammars, languages do not evolve entirely at random.
Shared cognitive and communicative pressures repeatedly push languages towards similar solutions."
Enduring patterns in the world’s languages (original news release) "New study finds one-third of grammatical ‘universals’ stand up to rigorous testing"
The evolution of a word-order universal on the global language tree. In our analysis of the universal “With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal subject–object–verb order are postpositional”, the absence or presence of the two features defines the ‘state’: state 11 (red) is the prediction made by the universal; in state 00 (black), both features are absent; in states 01 (orange) and 10 (light blue), one feature is absent and the other is present. The ancestral state reconstruction shows that in multiple language families and areas, pathways of language change repeatedly lead to the predicted outcome.
Fig. 2: Median natural log BF and their 95% HDI from the BayesTraits analyses showing support for co-evolutionary models.
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