On the probability distribution of typological frequencies

  • Authors:

  • Michael Cysouw

  • Affiliations:

  • Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

  • Venue:
  • MOL'07/09 Proceedings of the 10th and 11th Biennial conference on The mathematics of language
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Some language types are more frequent among the world's languages than others, and the field of linguistic typology attempts to elucidate the reasons for such differences in type frequency. However, there is no consensus in that field about the stochastic processes that shape these frequencies, and there is thus likewise no agreement about the expected probability distribution of typological frequencies. This paper explains the problem and presents a first attempt to build a theory of typological probability purely based on processes of language change.