There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language by VLADIMIR PERICLIEV
AbstractIn the target article, Trudgill assumes, based on the inspection of some Austronesian/Polynesian languages, that large community size favours mediumsized phonological inventories, whereas small community size favours either small phonological inventories or large inventories, and he then undertakes to explain these "facts". A crosslinguistic empirical test, however, reveals conclusively that such assumptions are invalid and therefore Trudgill's explanation is fallacious in explaining a phenomenon that does not exist.
Typically, a linguistic typology deÞnes all logically possible types and states which of these types are actually attested and which are not. The task then is to describe such a typology, preferably in the most economic way. In this paper, a descriptive principle is justiÞed to the effect that for any typology with at least one unattested type there exists a minimal description, consisting of a conjunction of non-statistical (implicational) Greenberg's Appendix II (1966) and Hawkins' Expanded Sample. Hawkins (1983) has noticed that Greenberg's universals do not describe all and only the attested types in Appendix II, but our analysis shows that Hawkins himself has not been fully successful in describing the typology in his Expanded Sample either.
universals, deÞning all and only the attested types. A method is proposed that Þnds the minimal description(s) of a typology, and a computer program is sketched that executes the method, illustrating it on the typologies in
The paper examines computationally the similarities in 100-word lists of basic vocabulary between Xokleng (a language of southeastern Brazil, classified as Macro-Ge) and Tagalog and Malay (languages of Southeast Asia) and Fijian, Samoan, and Hawaiian (languages of Oceania). It is found that in all five pair-wise comparisons the resemblances found are statistically highly significant (i.e., are greater-than-chance). A plausible explanation of these results is a possible historical (i.e., genetic or diffusional) relationship between these languages, a conjecture which is in accord with our previous studies, as well as with some contemporary genetic investigations indicating the existence of genetic affinities between Brazilian Indians and Southeast Asian and Oceanic populations. The hypothesis suggested, however,
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