An interesting asymmetry in syntactic change is that OV base order is commonly replaced by VO, whereas the reverse development is quite rare in languages.1 A shift to VO has taken place in several branches of the Indo-European family, as well as in Finno-Ugric. The Germanic languages conform to this trend in that the original OV order seen in its older representatives, and (in more rigid form) in modern German, Dutch, and Frisian, has given way to a consistently head-initial syntax (...) in English, Scandinavian, and Yiddish. (shrink)

A seminal 1921 work by the linguist Edward Sapir, outlining his influential ideas and hypotheses on language and its speakers.

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing (...) optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

The mathematical theory of communication.

Causal discovery becomes especially challenging when the possibility of latent confounding and/or selection bias is not assumed away. For this task, ancestral graph models are particularly useful in that they can represent the presence of latent confounding and selection effect, without explicitly invoking unobserved variables. Based on the machinery of ancestral graphs, there is a provably sound causal discovery algorithm, known as the FCI algorithm, that allows the possibility of latent confounders and selection bias. However, the orientation rules used in (...) the algorithm are not complete. In this paper, we provide additional orientation rules, augmented by which the FCI algorithm is shown to be complete, in the sense that it can, under standard assumptions, discover all aspects of the causal structure that are uniquely determined by facts of probabilistic dependence and independence. The result is useful for developing any causal discovery and reasoning system based on ancestral graph models. (shrink)

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages (...) containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show (...) that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures. (shrink)

The same categorical phenomena which are attributed to hard grammatical constraints in some languages continue to show up as statistical preferences in other languages, motivating a grammatical model that can account for soft constraints. The effects of a hierarchy of person (1st, 2nd 3rd) on grammar are categorical in some languages, most famously in languages withError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMap inverse systems, but also in languages with person restrictions on passivization. In Lummi, for example, the person (...) of the subject argument cannot be lower than the person of a nonsubject argument. If this would happen in the active, passivization is obligatory; if it would happen in the passive, the active is obligatory (Jelinek and Demers 1983). These facts follow from the theory of harmonic alignment in OT: constraints favoring the harmonic association of prominent person (1st, 2nd) with prominent syntactic function (subject) are hypothesized to be present as subhierarchies of the grammars of all languages, but to vary in their effects across languages depending on their interactions with other constraints (Aissen 1999). There is a statistical reflection of these hierarchies in English. The same disharmonic person/argument associations which are avoided categorically in languages like Lummi by making passives either impossible or obligatory, are avoided in the SWITCHBOARD corpus of spoken English by either depressing or elevating the frequency of passives relative to actives. The English data can be grammatically analyzed within the stochastic OT framework (Boersma 1998, Boersma and Hayes 2001) in a way which provides a principled and unifying explanation for their relation to the crosslinguistic categorical person effects studied by Aissen (1999). (shrink)