Linguistic Typology in Evolutionary Perspective

Instructors: Balthasar Bickel (Sapir Professor)

This course introduces and reviews two major shifts in current typlogy, the shift to phylogenetic modeling for capturing current typological distribution and the shift to cross-linguistic experiments for probing the forces that shape typological distributions. These two shifts characterize an evolutionary perspective on language that picks up from where Darwin and Schleicher left it, but profitting from modern methods and technology and considerably richer data. The first part introduces the basic methodology in modern linguistic phylogenetics. We will review the advantages of the evolutionary framework of these methods over purely synchronic and static ways of capturing typological distributions. We will discuss current solutions to problems of applications, such as splits in type, or ways of incorporating data from isolate languages, and we will showcase recent advances in moving beyond discrete types, modeling usage patterns instead. The second part addresses the fact that our models have access to only a very small proportion of the distributions that humanity produced since language emerged. This challenges any claim for universal (that is, species-wide) principles driving typological distributions. The problem can be solved to some extent by convergent evidence from experimentally testable mechanisms. Universality in language change, such as a preference for a certain pattern over another, is supported if it is grounded in a (neuro)biological mechanism that fully persists under maximally diverse conditions, even when usage frequencies in a language are at odds with it. We will review recent work along these lines, especially work that probes the presence of the same mechanism also in the prelinguistic systems of other animals.

Keywords: Language Evolution, Probabilistic Models, Quantitative Methods, Psycholinguistics, Typology, Language Change

Instructors

Balthasar Bickel (Sapir Professor)

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Balthasar Bickel is Professor of General Linguistics in the Department of Comparative Language Science at the University of Zurich. Since 2020 he has been the Director of a National Research Center in Switzerland, the NCCR Evolving Language, which unites over 40 research groups from across the natural, social, and computational sciences to unravel the past and future of human language. In his research, he uses experimental and data-science methods across languages and species to uncover the cultural and biological forces that determine how languages evolve over time and space, how they are processed and produced in our brains, and how they are acquired by children and adults.