Re: New Methodology on Analysis of Language Change

Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:14:24 GMT, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
> >>
> >> I ran across this last night. Does anyone know any more about the
> >> specifics of this and the methodology employed?
> >
> > Didn't we discuss this here? or was it only at ANE List?
> >
>
> Well, if we did, I must have missed it.
>
> > It's basically the same technique used by Ringe et al., which was
> > published in the last-but-one *Language* but which I reviewed in the
> > 1998 Mair volume on the peoples of Inner Asia; it comes down to GIGO.
> > The results depend more closely than usual on the selection of the data
> > to be analyzed.
> >
>
> I tried to figure out exactly what they were doing but failed. The quest
> took me to the "Science" website and I have to pay $10.00 for a day pass to
> read the bigger article.

I hope you didn't do so ... Your central public library, and even the
bigger branches, should ahve *Science*; if it's current, you can buy it
at Borders (or B&N).

> Apparently word order was only one of the 125 features that were programmed
> in. Presence or absence of word "gender" was another.

And in the size of a *Science* article, they probably don't list them.

Sometimes *Science* has on-line-only supplements with actual data in
them.

> "The researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features
> in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such
> as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether
> nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German
> and French."

How did they pick 15 of the hundreds of Papuan languages?

Do any of the authors claim to be linguists?

> So now I know 2 features. I'm in the dark on 123 of the others.
>
> > Word order is of course a highly unstable property over time, so I
> > wonder why they chose to use it at all.
>
> I might add that grammatical gender is can be unstable too.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.