Diachronic evidence against source-oriented explanation in typology

Abstract

Source-oriented explanation in typology challenges a number of well-established universals, including the correlational universals of harmonic ordering of heads and dependents. It dispenses with functional or cognitive explanations of these because harmonic orders may simply be explained as one order emerging from the other and thus as historical accidents. We provide twofold evidence against this approach and show that (i) universally preferred structures may emerge without any preconditions in the grammaticalization source and (ii) that universally dispreferred structures of the source disappear in the course of time. First, we demonstrate that the development of the three harmonic, head-first word orders (VO, AdpN, NGen) in Postclassical Greek can hardly be considered a historical coincidence, because they match chronologically and, at the same time, are entirely unrelated etymologically, and because neither of these had a bias for ordering heads before dependents in the source. The emergence of the three harmonic word orders is extremely improbable under the null hypothesis of a development by chance (odds 0.037). Secondly, we provide evidence for the reverse case: cross-linguistically dispreferred properties inherited from the source are abandoned in the course of the development.