Abstract

The discovery of general patterns and their subsequent explanation is a familiar method in linguistics and other cross-cultural research. This paper addresses the computerized discovery of significant cultural and linguistic patterns, specifically implicational universals. We dispute published suggestions that the mechanical generation of universals is inadvisable, by arguing that such claims confuse the discovery of a pattern with its explanation. We propose a principled method that uses permutation tests to estimate whether the discovered universals are significant. Finally, these methods are used to mine the rich kinship dataset contributed by G.P. Murdock in 1970, and to report eleven universals found therein.

full paper (rtf)