Abstract
This paper discusses the maximum robustness approach for studying cases of adaptation in language. We live in an age where we have more data on more languages than ever before, and more data to link it with from other domains. This should make it easier to test hypotheses involving adaptation, and also to spot new patterns that might be explained by adaptation. However, there is not much discussion of the overall approach to research in this area. There are outstanding questions about how to formalize theories, what the criteria are for directing research and how to integrate results from different methods into a clear assessment of a hypothesis. This paper addresses some of those issues by suggesting an approach which is causal, incremental and robust. It illustrates the approach with reference to a recent claim that dry environments select against the use of precise contrasts in pitch. Study 1 replicates a previous analysis of the link between humidity and lexical tone with an alternative dataset and finds that it is not robust. Study 2 performs an analysis with a continuous measure of tone and finds no significant correlation. Study 3 addresses a more recent analysis of the link between humidity and vowel use and finds that it is robust, though the effect size is small and the robustness of the measurement of vowel use is low. Methodological robustness of the general theory is addressed by suggesting additional approaches including iterated learning, a historical case study, corpus studies, and studying individual speech.
Highlights
The goal of evolutionary approaches to linguistics is to explain similarities and differences between languages
We are experiencing a kind of gold rush of cross-cultural statistical studies, where it feels like anyone with a laptop and access to the internet could find the big Robust Approaches to Linguistic Adaptation discovery in cultural evolution (Ladd et al, 2015)
It suggests that the relationship between tone and humidity is not robust to controls for historical relationships, and in particular confounded by areal effects
Summary
The goal of evolutionary approaches to linguistics is to explain similarities and differences between languages. Instead of presenting one methodology which would have provided a single answer (the maximum validity method), Roberts et al (2015) used nine different statistical methods and two datasets to address the question They produced a space of results and linked each one to the assumptions of its method. The ultimate suggestion of the paper was that large-scale, cross-cultural statistics was not the best approach for addressing this question due to the complexities of the confounding factors, and instead future research should concentrate on localized experiments, which are quite feasible in this case (Thoma and Tytus, 2017) Aspects of both approaches are, part of the ideal scientific method, the careful expression of assumptions from the maximum validity method, and the repeated testing of the maximum robustness method.
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