Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations

Abstract

Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of word order, are aggregate properties, which do not represent the use of linguistic cues in context directly. Still, such variables can be useful for circumscribing the potential role of communicative efficiency in language evolution, if we move from cross-linguistic trade-offs to multivariate causal networks. This idea is illustrated by a case study of linguistic variables related to four types of Subject and Object cues: case marking, rigid word order of Subject and Object, tight semantics and verb-medial order. The variables are obtained from online language corpora in thirty languages, annotated with the Universal Dependencies. The causal model suggests that the relationships between the variables can be explained predominantly by sociolinguistic factors, leaving little space for a potential impact of efficient linguistic behavior.

Linguistic correlates of societal variation: A quantitative analysis

“…In conclusion, our study is consistent with the previous findings of the existence of correlations between exotericity/esotericity and grammatical complexity, for example, [ 34 , 55 , 56 ]. More specifically, [ 56 ] also found an inverse correlation between exotericity and morphological complexity.…”

Variation in the production of Basque ergativity: Change or stable variation?

“…Our study opens several venues for further inquiry into the analysis of Basque ergativity, morphosyntactic change, and language revitalization more broadly. As a reviewer suggested, future work could also examine the consequences of variable ergative -k marking on word order, especially given that recent findings show that inverse correlations (trade-offs) are indeed mediated by social factors (Levshina, 2021). Furthermore, speakers' metapragmatic commentaries should not remain uncharted, as they may reflect social awareness, at least at the individual level.…”

The co-evolution of pragmatics and grammatical complexity

“…nouns) that trigger agreement, and without there 3 We note that the centrality of syntax to sentence understanding has increasingly become a matter of debate (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2006). In fact, a growing literature in the psycholinguistic and computational domains attempts to 'explain away' the contribution of syntax to parsing in the comprehension process, by appeal either to semantics (Van Lancker, 2001), prosodic effects (Fodor, 2002;Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999;Speer et al, 1996), pragmatic inferences (Levshina, 2021;Mahowald et al, 2022;Steedman & Altmann, 1989;Steels & Casademont, 2015;Wit & Gillette, 1999), or complexity in the parsing process itself (Chaves & Putnam, 2020;Liu et al, 2022). These empirical approaches capture the intuition, with which we concur, that many utterances can be understood on the basis of cues such as animacy, word order, or world knowledge, rather than syntax proper -that is, using the direct phonology-to-semantics mapping.…”