| Abstract | Across the world, languages vary in their ways of enumeration. Some
languages, but not others, have dedicated linguistic mechanisms for
counting certain objects and/or large numbers. Numeral classifiers are
words or affixes to nouns that are used for counting certain classes
of objects, such as "animate things" or "coconuts". Specific counting
systems go a step further and count specific classes of objects by
units greater than one, such as (e.g.) pairs or twenties.
Examining Oceanic languages, Bender and Beller have advanced the idea
that numeral classifiers and specific counting systems are
object-specific, refer to culturally-salient semantic domains, and are
often used to enumerate large quantities. Here we test their
hypothesis that these linguistic features may have co-evolved with
aspects of socioecology, specifically, norms of redistribution such as
chiefly tribute that are found in socially stratified societies. We
use comparative data across a sample of Austronesian ethnolinguistic
groups, lexical phylogenies of these languages as a model of
population history, and statistical methods from evolutionary biology
to (a) reconstruct the most likely model of history of counting
systems and social structure and (b) test for causal co-evolutionary
processes. Using phylogenetic approaches not only allows us to control
for Galton's Problem but allows us to test these language-culture
coevolutionary hypotheses in a framework that delivers estimates of
the processes of cultural change. These results speak to broader
issues regarding the flexibility of human numerical cognition, as well
as shed light on the specific development of counting systems within
the Austronesian cultural context. |
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