The Dimensions of Morphosyntactic Variation: Whorf, Greenberg and Nichols were right

We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost all of the morphosyntactic features found in The World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). We apply Factor Analysis of Mixed Data, and determine that the main dimensions of global...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistic typology at the crossroads 2023-12, Vol.3 (2), p.132-190
Main Authors: Siva Kalyan, Mark Donohue
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
areality
computational linguistics
head/dependent-marking
morphosyntax
typology
word order
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost all of the morphosyntactic features found in The World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). We apply Factor Analysis of Mixed Data, and determine that the main dimensions of global morphological variation involve (1) word order in clauses and adpositional phrases, (2) head- versus dependent-marking, and (3) a set of features that show an east-west distribution. We find roughly the same features clustering in similar dimensions when we examine individual macro-areas, thus confirming the universal relevance of these groupings of features, as encapsulated in well-known implicational universals. This study confirms established insights in linguistic typology, extending earlier research to a much larger set of languages, and uncovers a number of areal patterns in the data.
ISSN:2785-0943
DOI:10.6092/issn.2785-0943/17482