Last week in an EU:Sci podcast, Christos Christodoulopoulos challenged me to find a correlation between the basic word order of the language people use and the number of children they have.  This was off the back of a number of spurious correlations with which readers of Replicated Typo will be familiar.  Here are the results!

First, I do a straightforward test of whether word order is correlated with the number of children you have.  This comes out as significant!  I wonder if  having more children hanging around affects the adaptive pressures on langauge?  However, I then show that this result is undermined by discovering that there are other linguistic variables that are even better predictors.

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This week’s EU:Sci podcast includes an interview with me about my work on spurious correlations between social structures and linguistic structures (see my overview post here).  Christos Christodoulopoulos challenges me to find a link between the number of children a family has and the basic word order they use.  Complete nonsense with an important message:  Any correlation is possible.

Edit: A longer version of my interview at EU:Sci is now available online, Listen here!

A few weeks ago we launched the QHImp Qhallenge to see if chimpanzees really did have better working memories than humans.  The results showed that humans were better than previously thought, but still not up to the level of chimps.  Now we’ve extended the QHImp Qhallenge to test Matsuzawa’s theory that semantic links are overloading our working memory and making the task difficult.  You can now play the QHImp Qhallenge with letters of the alphabet, novel symbols, shades of colour and directional arrows.  We’ll be comparing performance on these tasks to the numeral task to see if fewer semantic links make the task easier.

Click here to play the QHImp Qhallenge!

Finally, antagonists of the ‘tree’ view of evolution have a metaphor of their own (from SMBC).

I went to a good talk almost a year ago at the Interfaces III conference at the University of Kent, and I said I’d write about it, but I never got around to it. The slides have been on my desktop ever since. Now that I have a couple hours to kill on the train coming back from the MPI in Nijmegen, here’s that promise fulfilled. I’m going mostly from the slides, so nicely sent to me, and any errors in the transcription from those are my own.

The evolution of numeral classifier constructions

Vipas Pothipath, Dept. of Thai, Chulalongkorn University
The talk was based on work done at both Chulalongkorm and the MPI for Evo. Anthr. in Leipzig, as well as on (then unpublished, although it might be now) Pothipath’s PhD thesis.

A number classifier is a morpheme typically appearing next to a numeral or a quantifier, categorizing the noun with which it co-occurs on a semantic basis. An example would be the Thai, where tua is the classifier:

• mǎ: sǎ:m tua
• dog three CLF (lit. ‘body’)
• three dogs

These can also be bound morphemes, and can co-occur with ordinal numerals or definitive markers. Pothipath focused on cardinal numerals, and defined numeral classifier constructions (NCCs) as syntactic constructions basically consisting of two core constituents, namely a cardinal numeral X and a numeral classifier Y. This case would be exemplified by the above Thai example, which is just as grammatical when mǎ: ’dog’ is dropped and only the numeral and classifier remain. Now, based on WALS, these exist in many languages across the world (although not so much in Europe), and are sometimes optional and occasionally obligatory. The sample size was only 56 languages, so there might be more widespread variation. Pothipath claims that the optional/obligatory split shows a possibility of a typologial continuum, and that the evolution can be shown using an evolutionary ladder.

This continuum wouldn’t work if there weren’t different types of NCCs. He outlines these (although the names given here are mostly my own):

1. Repeater: Where a noun is used as the numeral classifier for the noun itself, particularly when there isn’t a suitable classifier for that noun. (I wish there had been a bit of a more explicit statement about how this isn’t just a switch in syntax for noun and number, as can be seen in the example given (fǽm) hâ: fǽm ‘(file) five files’.)
2. Free form classifier: Where there is a single form used for certain nouns that isn’t related morphologically or lexically synchronically.
3. Affixal classifier: Like above, but bound to the numeral, as in mat=tol ‘CLF=three’ in Taba. (Bowden, 2001)
4. Obligatory affixal classifier: Here, the classifier is a dependant morpheme on the numeral, as in maq-ond ‘CLF-one’ in Malto. (Steever 1998)
5. Joined (unanalyzable) classifier: Where a different lexical form is used for the numeral depending on the nature of the noun.

Now, among the languages Pothipath looked at, some showed more than one morphological type of NCC. This might be a sign that, under the theory of grammaticalisation, free forms develop into the final lexically closed type of classifier. He goes on to show, using diachronich examples, where different languages show this change. Interestingly, he cites Hurford (2001) as a justification for the affixation of classifiers when they are numerals less than 4, as these behave differently than the other numeral words (as they are used more, among other reasons). I wonder if this has any implications for the broad use of the Swadesh list, especially in cases like in the ASJP database which only has around 40 words per language in it. Later, he also mentions Corbett (2000), as the Animacy Hierarchy influences the lexicalisation of classifiers in Warekena.

The argument stands on the idea that a cline of grammaticality in current systems may show a hypothetical evolutionary ladder, which Pothipath rightfully notes as tentative thikning. He also gives a counter example from Beijing Mandarin, which only had limited scope. But, in essence, this is another cyclic case for grammaticalisation theory. Overall, it’s good research, and adds a bit more to the puzzle.

——

There was at least one open question for me after the talk, which a little WALSing was able to corroborate – is the link between gender assignment and numeral classifiers clear? How do they influence each other? Here’s the WALS markup for that.

As can be seen here, classifiers don’t appear when there is semantic and formal gender assignment. I think that’s interesting. I’d like to take a closer look and see if there are any cases where the numeral classifiers and semantic gender assignments clash – I suspect that they are linked, but that the evolutionary grammaticalisation cycle might be too complex to evolve easily. As I’ve got other evolutionary morphological processes on my mind (cf. my evolang talk), I won’t be looking into this soon, but it is an open question that might have some nice low hanging fruit.

References

• Bowden, J. (2001). Taba: description of a South Halmahera language. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
• Corbett, G. G. (2000). Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gil, D. (2005). Numeral classifiers. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil & B. Comrie (Eds.), (pp. 226-229).
• Hurford, J.R. (2001) Numeral Systems. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by N.J.Smelser and P.B.Baltes, Pergamon, Amsterdam. pp.10756- 10761.
• Vipas Pothipath (2008). Typology and Evolution of Numeral-Noun Constructions Unpublished PhD Thesis at the University of Edinburgh
• Pothipath, V. (2011) The Evolution of numeral classifier constructions: a syntax-morphology-lexicon interface.
• Steever, S. B. (1998). Malto in S.B.Steever (ed.) The Dravidian languages. London: Routledge, pp. 359-387.

I recently posted about a thematic session entitled ‘Theory and evidence in language evolution research’ at the Poznan Linguistics Meeting.  The call for paper is still open!  Here’s the call:

PLM2012 – Session CfP – Theory and evidence in language evolution

Earlier today we released an experiment on working memory in humans and chimps.  You can play the game here.

We’ve had responses from about 70 people, and we have some results.  Some are summarised on the live results page.

Astoundingly, people actually managed to get 9 numbers shown for only 210 ms!  Replicated Typo’s very own James Winters was one of those mavericks, but puts it down to luck.

There were some early leaders, but in the last few hours, the player known as ‘mjb’ has really kicked everybody’s ass and got to the top of all three leaderboards.  Who are you, magic human?  Let us know!

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Post by Bodo Winter:

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s talk at this Evolang gave an impressively confident and forceful argument for linguistic nativism. The basic tenets of the Chomskyan view of language evolution were reiterated with some old and some new arguments along the way. Piattelli-Palmarini (P.P.) claimed that (1) language is modular and autonomous from other cognitive systems, (2) syntax dominates other aspects of language such as semantics, and (3) that language has not arisen through natural selection because it is a non-adaptive trait. In line with Chomskyan syntactocentrism, syntax was argued to be the major evolutionary transition in the evolution of language.

Generally, it is a good thing to have strong arguments for a particular position because it spurs discussion and excites new research. However, P.P.’s arguments very much neglected or belittled major empirical advances in evolutionary linguistics and cognitive science. If this new evidence is taken into account, the picture that emerges is very different from what P.P. argued for.

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Monica Tamariz presented a poster at Evolang (runner up for the best poster award) about linguistic replicators.  This is an alternative view to Andrew Smith’s talk and Bill Benzon’s post on the same subject.

Below I’ve copied out sections of Tamariz’s poster:

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Yashuiro Suzuki (from Nagoya University, co-authoring with Megumi Sakai and Kazuhiro Adachi) presents a model of the evolution of an honest signalling system between plants and insects.  While honest signalling systems have been studied before, this was the first I harve heard of one between species, and certainly between kingdoms.

The vast majority of animals communicate to some extent.  Many signalling systems used by animals use costly signals, the paradigm case bign the peacock’s tail (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997).  Growing a long tail imposes a developmental and predatory cost and so only fit individuals can afford to grow long tails.  This makes it difficult to trick others into thinking that you are fitter than you actually are.

However, there are systems which use ‘cheap’ signals, the most often used example being badges of status in sparrows.  Sparrows have a patch of bright feathers on their chest.  A bigger patch signals a better fighter.  This is advantageous since they can avoid fights they would not win.  Yet, there appears to be no cost to growing the patch (although this is contested by some).  Zahavi & Zahavi suggest that ‘cheaters’ who do sport badges larger than their abilities are eventually punished when they get into fights with bigger birds.  Thus, the system remains honest.

Suzuki describes a system of communication between plants and insects.  Plants are in constant danger of bugs such as caterpillars.  However, some plants can emit a chemical that attracts small insects that will come and attack and eat the bugs.  The chemical is emitted when there are many bugs attacking.  However, there are plant mutants named ‘cry-wolf’ plants who emit the chemical even when there are very few bugs attacking it.  In this way, the cry-wolf plants have a small advantage over the normal plants.  However, the cry-wolf plants damage the stability of the signalling system.  The insects are attracted to the cry-wolf plants only to find a smaller meal than expected.  If this situation presists, the insect’s association between the chemical and food diminishes and they eventually stop coming.

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