Competing Methods for Uncovering Linguistic Diversity: The Case of Definite and Indefinite Articles

Davis, Gillon and Matthewson (hereafter Davis et al) argue that “hypothesisdriven fieldwork has led to a more complete and accurate picture of linguistic diversity than has been produced by methods which rely largely on extracting information from existing descriptive grammars”. They discuss five cases to support their conclusion. In this response, I will discuss only one of these cases, since this case involves two chapters of mine (Dryer 2005a, 2005b, 2013a, 2013b) in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al 2005, Dryer and Haspelmath 2013) (hereafter the WALS atlas). These chapters deal with definite and indefinite articles among the languages of the world (though for reasons discussed in §6, I use these labels in a considerably broader sense than many would expect). I will argue that the research for these two chapters uncovered