Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

224 P. Muysken, H. Hammarström, J. Birchall, R. v. Gijn, O. Krasnoukhova, N. Müller
Fig. 5: Agreement and fraction of random worlds with lower agreement, as functions of
# features to be cherry-picked, for the set of languages {Kwazá, Karo, Mekens}.
est neighbours are Kanoé, Itonama, Baure, so Kanoé-4 and Wari’-4 are the
same area. Other cells are epiphenomenal in the sense that they are extensions
of other cells which are more significant. For example, Kanoé-4 has a significance
of .005, and Kanoé-5 – which is just Kanoé-4 with Movima added to it –
has less significance (.009). Thus adding Movima made the whole less of a
Sprachbund and it is only significant, albeit diluted, because the original
Sprachbund was. Similarly, given a very significant Sprachbund, if we take
away one language that makes it less significant, it may still be quite significant
if the original Sprachbund was very significant. Such cases – diminished
variants of more significant cells – are also epiphenomenal. If we remove all
duplicate cells, epiphenomenal cells, and non-Guaporé-Mamoré cells, only two
Sprachbunds remain, as show in Table 5.
Intuitively speaking, the remaining two Sprachbunds, without being fully
epiphenomenal, are in fact also quite similar in that 4 languages are shared
between the two. They can be taken as alternative answers to Crevels and
Van der Voort’s (2008: 166, 172) question about the appropriate boundaries and
break-up of the Guapore-Mamoré linguistic area.
Which are the features that account for the Sprachbunds in Table 5? Appendix
4 shows the 55 cherry-picked features and agreement levels of the most