Kaius Sinnemäki

Cognitive processing, language typology, and variation

UNLABELLED Linguistic typological preferences have often been linked to cognitive processing preferences but often without recourse to typologically relevant experiments on cognitive processing. This article reviews experimental work on the possible parallels between preferences in cognitive processing and language typology. I summarize the main theoretical accounts of the processing-typology connection and show that typological distributions arise diachronically from preferred paths of language change, which may be affected by the degree to which alternative structures are preferred (e.g., easier) in acquisition or usage. The surveyed experimental evidence shows that considerable support exists for many linguistic universals to reflect preferences in cognitive processing. Artificial language learning experiments emerge as a promising method for researching the processing-typology connection, as long as its limitations are taken into account. I further show that social and cultural differences in cognition may have an effect on typological distributions and that to account for this variation a multidisciplinary approach to the processing-typology connection has to be developed. Lastly, since the body of experimental research does not adequately represent the linguistic diversity of the worlds languages, it remains as an urgent task for the field to better account for this diversity in future work. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:477-487. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1294 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. CONFLICT OF INTEREST The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

A typological perspective on Differential Object Marking

Abstract Case marking of the object is often claimed to be driven specifically by two referential properties of the object, animacy and definiteness. Data from 744 languages, however, provide typological evidence that there is no universal preference for object case marking to be driven by these properties, but at the same time provide strong evidence that object case marking tends to be restricted in some way rather than be generalized across all objects. I argue that the independence of object case marking from these two semantic-pragmatic properties may be explained by the instability of their relationship, and that economy provides a feasible explanation for restricting case marking to only some objects.

Language structures may adapt to the sociolinguistic environment, but it matters what and how you count: A typological study of verbal and nominal complexity

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures.

Global optimization and complexity trade-offs

Abstract It is sometimes assumed in research on language complexity that if languages tended towards some optimal level of global complexity, so that all languages would be roughly equally complex, then local complexity trade-offs should be a general principle in language. Drawing evidence from computer simulations I show that in equally complex systems the proportion of trade-offs (significant negative correlations) is higher than in random systems but far from being a general principle in language. In addition, it may be impossible to determine whether a certain correlation-set comes from random systems or equally complex systems. Based on these results a correlational approach on a handful of typological variables cannot be used to validate, or even falsify, the assumption that all languages are equally complex and, therefore, complexity trade-offs should be kept separate from that assumption. The typological distribution of complexity, drawn from the World Atlas of Language Structures, is further shown to differ from both random systems and equally complex systems.