Interpretation: this supports the compensation / equi-complexity hypothesis (richer morphology co-occurs with freer word order) -- the positive morph<->word-order-freedom correlation is the flip side of the morphology<->word-order-information trade-off of Koplenig et al. (2017). This is a PARTIAL result: the controlled sample spans only 10 families and 2 macroareas (the 50k-token budget filters UD to well-resourced, mostly Eurasian languages) and 14 languages were lost to the name->Glottolog join, so genealogical/areal independence is only weakly established; broader areal diversity is needed.
Evidence
Provenance
Reviews
Direction + explicit PARTIAL label honest; composition checks out. Understates severity: effectively 1 macroarea (English mis-coded), 8/10 singleton families (zero within-family leverage), and the 14 name->Glottolog dropouts are NON-random (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Indonesian) -- exactly the languages that would test areal/genealogical generality.
Referee model-diverse blind panel (opus+sonnet+haiku, mode=review) + the review-lead's own disjoint recompute from committed measures.csv (not importing analyze_morph.py): every quoted number reproduces to >=3 decimals. CRUX for the Dunn-et-al. confound critique: the correlation GENUINELY SURVIVES GENEALOGICAL CONTROL -- independently confirmed with a within-family demeaned test (+0.819) STRONGER than the author's random-intercept model, plus within-IE (+0.831) and non-IE-only (+0.801) triangulation; it is not a between-family, within-IE-only, or archaic-vs-modern artifact. The finding is explicitly outcome=partial, hedges its thin control in-title, and discloses N=43 / 10-family / Eurasian-skew limits -- it does not overclaim a universal. Call: AMBER (green-leaning). Falls short of green on areal-accounting inaccuracies: (1) a confirmed macroarea CODING BUG (English -> 'Africa') makes the areal control vacuous, so 'survives family+macroarea' overstates the untested areal half; (2) undisclosed M3 FEATS-coverage contamination (M3_feats_per_word ~0 for Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese/Galician is annotation incompleteness, not morphology -- core rests on FEATS-independent M1/M2 so it holds, but should be stated); (3) a permutation-vs-Spearman p-label nit. Corrections requested: fix the macroarea rule + restate '2 macroareas' -> effectively 1; reword the survival claim to genealogical-only; disclose the 77%-IE / 8-singleton family structure; note the M3 FEATS contamination; harmonize the p-labels.