March 6, 2012 in Uncategorized Levinson & Gray (2012)
demonstrate how tools from evolutionary biology can help refine
the way we look at human language and human cognition.
Phylogenetic techniques allow researchers to properly control
for the fact that languages are related by descent. More
importantly, these tools allow the study of the full variation
of linguistic structures, rather than assuming that the majority
of linguistic structure is constrained by a limited set of
Universal Grammar parameters. This topic has been discussed
before, by the authors and on this blog, but this paper is much
more a manifesto for change. Using phylogenetic techniques can
lead to different conclusions: For example, Greenberg found that
certain orders of particular types of word correlate with
others. However, this study assumed that languages are
independent. Dunn et al. (2011) used Bayesian phologenetic
techniques to show that, although there are correlations, they
are not consistent across language families (blogged about