Extent and limits of linguistic diversity as the remit of typology – but through constraints on what is diversity limited?

Unbounded circumambient patterns in segmental phonology

“…First, Piantadosi & Gibson (2014) show that, in general, the number of independent languages that linguists need to observe to achieve reasonable statistical confidence that a particular type of feature or phenomenon is categorically impossible is far higher than they are likely to observe and document for many generations. Second, even if we had both detailed descriptions and computational analyses for the phonology of every language currently spoken, this would only constitute a small and likely unrepresentative fraction of all human languages spoken in the last 100,000–200,000 years (Plank 2007, Bowern 2011). Third, even if we had reasonably complete analyses on both current and past human languages, for these data to be strongly informative about what is likely or even possible in potential future human languages requires either good reasons to believe such data are representative of all possible human languages or a dynamic model of how languages change over long timescales that would allow us to make such predictions (see e.g.…”