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December 4, 2007
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In recent years there has been an interest in the phenomenon of “Similar Place Avoidance” (SPA), particularly as concerns Arabic CCC radicals. Although little evidence has been considered outside Arabic, Hebrew, and perhaps Semitic in general, where roots with successive consonants sharing the same place of articulation are underrepresented, similarity avoidance has sometimes been hypothesized as a universal tendency. Progressively extending our scope from the Atlantic subgroup of Niger-Congo in its relation with other Niger-Congo languages, which had been our original, diachronic concern, to almost all of Africa and beyond, we undertook an extensive crosslinguistic investigation of SPA and found impressive support for this notion.
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Donohue (2005a) argues that the SVO order of most southern Austronesian languages found between mainland Southeast Asia and New Guinea is due to contact with non-Austronesian languages. I offer a number of other correlations between word order features and geographic area, establishing that the well-discussed division between “eastern” and “western” (or “Papuan” and “Austronesian”) languages in the Indonesian archipelago is not a crisp one, but is one that should be essentially maintained. Despite the fact that the division, traditionally based on the position of the genitive, generally matches the western boundary of “Central Malayo-Polynesian” (Blust 1993), a better explanation for the break is shown to be influence from languages with a typology matching that found in western New Guinea. At the same time, the much less discussed break between the northern and the southern Austronesian languages is established, mapping the contrast between the northern, “Philippinetype” Austronesian languages and their southern neighbours, despite the lack of any well-accepted genetic boundary between these two areas, implying substratal influence similar to that which characterises the eastern Austronesian languages.
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Modern linguistic typology is increasingly less concerned with what is possible in human languages (universals) and increasingly more with the question “what's where why?” (Bickel 2007). Moreover, as several recent papers in this journal show, typologists increasingly turn to quantitative approaches as a means to understanding typological distributions. In order to provide the quantitative study of typological distributions with a firm methodological foundation it is preferable to gain a grasp of simple facts before starting to ask the more complicated questions. In this article the only assumptions we make about languages are that (i) they may be partly described by a set of typological characteristics, each of which may either be found or not found in any given language; that (ii) languages may be genealogically related or not; and that (iii) languages are spoken in certain places. Given these minimal assumptions we can begin to ask how to express the differences and similarities among languages as functions of the geographical distances among them, whether different functions apply to genealogically related and unrelated languages, and whether it is possible to distinguish in some quantitative way between languages that are related and languages that are not, even when the languages in question are spoken at great distances from one another. Moreover, we may investigate the effects that factors such as ecology, migration, and rates of linguistic change or diffusion have on the degree of similarities among languages in cases where they are either related or unrelated. We will approach these questions from two perspectives. The first perspective is an empirical one, where observations primarily derive from analyses of the data of Haspelmath et al. (eds.) (2005). The second perspective is a computational one, where simulations are drawn upon to test the effects of different parameters on the development of structural linguistic diversity.
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April McMahon and Robert McMahon, Language Classification by Numbers . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, xvii + 265 pages, ISBN 978-0-19-927901-2, £ 57.50 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-19-927902-0, £ 22.50 (paperback). (John Nerbonne) April McMahon and Robert McMahon, Language Classification by Numbers . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, xvii + 265 pages, ISBN 978-0-19-927901-2, £ 57.50 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-19-927902-0, £ 22.50 (paperback). (Claire Bowern) Östen Dahl, The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity . (Studies in Language Companion Series, 71.) Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004, ISBN 978-90-272-3081-2, EUR 115; ISBN 978-1-58811-554-6, US$ 138. (Elena Maslova)
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