From genes to language universals and linguistic diversity: building causal explanations across levels, timescales, methods and scientific disciplines

Establishing causality is essential to the scientific enterprise and the language sciences are no exception. In this talk I will discuss the difficulties of generating and testing causal stories when we must cross several scientific disciplines and connect time-scales and levels ranging from molecules to patterns of linguistic diversity and universal tendencies. I will first briefly discuss the "Causality in the Sciences" framework and then proceed to dissect (from a causal point of view) my proposal that vocal tract anatomy (ultimately with a genetic component) might play a role in explaining some patterns of cross-linguistic variation in phonetics and phonology. This detailed discussion will hopefully generalize to other such attempts at establishing long, multi-level, multi-method and multi-disciplinary causal stories.