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Stability of word order: Even simple questions need careful answers

Dunn et al. (2011) attempt an exciting piece of research, investigating which word-order parameters are co-dependent or independent, and which are stable or not. Claims about “universality” have to be taken with several grains of salt, since they investigate only four families, compared to the dozens of families that have been part of samples for the last several decades. More significantly, however, is the implicit claim that evolutionary models are appropriate for modelling the kinds of change (or stability) that they investigate. Since the focus of their article is on the family-internal patterns of conservatism or innovation in word order, I shall focus on an important aspect of their construction of language family relationships that appears to be at odds with the kinds of evolutionary models that they employ, and so which, failing to take into account contact (e.g., Thomason & Kaufman 1988 and many more), reveals the study to suffer from a failure to consider critical data and models that are in fact more explanatory than their own.