WALS and empiricism

Martin Haspelmath haspelmath at eva.mpg.de
Thu Nov 6 19:47:48 UTC 2008


Thanks, Tom, for these interesting comments! But they demand a response:
> I think Martin, perhaps inadvertently, articulated the concern that 
> some of us have felt about the WALS project from its very 
> inception--it's relentless a-theoretical perspective. To me, this 
> project has chosen to follow the old empiricist misonception  (vis 
> Bloomfield,  Carnap, etc.) that facts are, somehow, 
> theory-independent, and that one can do a theory-free typology. 
That data and theory are interdependent is a truism. But the problem 
with the term "theory" in linguistics is that it has been virtually 
monopolized by the generative view of the world. The Greenbergian 
functionalist theory underlying WALS is of a very different sort.

What matters to me (and to empirical typology in general) is that it 
makes no sense to postpone typology till we somehow find "the right 
theory", which provides all the categories that languages might have. 
This is basically the generative approach, and for this reason 
generative linguistics has not led to any major insights into 
cross-linguistic regularities. Boas, Sapir and Bloomfield were right 
that all languages have their own categories (a position that was more 
recently articulated by people such as Lazard, Dryer, LaPolla, Croft, 
Bickel), so the typological concepts have to be different from 
linguistic categories.
> This is done by two implicit moves: First, by defining grammatical 
> phenomena purely structurally, rather than grouping them by the 
> *grammaticalized functional domains* that underlie them. And second, 
> by leaving *diachrony* out of the equation. 
I find these remarks puzzling. Many of the WALS chapters have been 
conceived of in terms of functional domains, and of course many of the 
generalizations are ultimately due to diachronic factors. I think most 
WALS authors are fully aware of this. Still, to make systematic 
cross-linguistic databases, we need consistently applicable definitions 
of the types (which one might call "purely structural definitions").

The main difference between WALS and Givonian work is the scale: In 
WALS, each chapter looks at 200 languages or more (the average number of 
languages per map is 400). We feel that this is necessary, because the 
earlier practice of taking a few languages and jumping to 
generalizations, while suggestive and interesting, does not provide a 
firm basis about what is truly general.
> To my mind, the geographical distribution of grammatical phenomena is 
> neigh meaningless without considering the diachrony of the particular 
> languages (or families) in the region. 
I don't know anyone who would disagree with this statement. The problem 
is that while grammaticalization gives us the beginning of a theory of 
morphosyntactic patterns, we don't even have the beginning of a 
diachronic theory of the large-scale areal patterns. That these are so 
common for all areas of language structure is a fascinating, though 
currently quite enigmatic observation.
> It is of course true that a project could choose to be less ambitious, 
> and simply give us "pure facts", perhaps in anticipation that 
> theory-oriented people would later on use those facts to build their 
> theories. But I have to agree with Hanson (and, for that matter, 
> Chomsky, perish the thought...) that in science facts are never 
> theory-neutral, and that to propose to do a science of "pure facts", 
> even as a preliminary exercise to  subsequent theory-building, is the 
> height of self delusion.
>
> Cheers,  TG
I don't think that the Greenbergian work from the 1960s is rightly 
characterized as "the height of self-delusion", and WALS represents a 
continuation of that tradition. While practically all of the famous 
Chomskyan parameters of the 1980s have dissipated and disappeared from 
the scene (see my 2008 paper in the Biberauer volume), the great 
majority of Greenberg's universals from 1963 have survived.

We are still struggling to understand these patterns, but nobody is 
deluding themselves. World-wide linguistics is much like geology: You 
first need to do a lot of on-site fieldwork to get a good sense of what 
the mountain range is like, before you can begin to construct your 
ambitious (catastrophist, gradualist, etc.) explanatory stories.

Best,
Martin




> Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>> Dear Esa,
>>
>> Thanks a lot for writing this detailed commentary on the World Atlas 
>> of Language Structures (WALS). This is the most detailed review that 
>> has been written, and we are very grateful for it. Many of the 
>> individual points of criticism are well-taken, and the WALS authors 
>> should take them into account in future editions. (We're planning 
>> future online editions of WALS, see the free online version at 
>> http://wals.info.)
>>
>> Just one comment, concerning one of your major points:
>>
>> You write (p. 1): "The reader of WALS is encouraged ... to seek 
>> *correlations* between the results of different chapters, and this 
>> clearly presupposes a high degree of compatibility between the views 
>> of different authors."
>>
>> Well, I would say: To find true correlations, the chapters must be 
>> sufficiently correct, but they don't necessarily have to be very 
>> compatible, certainly not in terminology. Suppose you want to link 
>> case-marking and plural marking, and ask whether affixal case-marking 
>> (as opposed to adpositional marking) correlates with affixal plural 
>> marking (as opposed to pluralization by number words). Then even if 
>> the two chapters use different definitions of "affixal", you might 
>> still get a true correlation. But it will of course be a correlation 
>> between affixal(1) case-marking and affixal(2) pluralization, not 
>> between "affixal (tout court) case-marking and pluralization".
>>
>> My view is that typological definitions are inherently 
>> linguist-specific, and as such the typological concepts of different 
>> linguists are bound to be different (unless a Chomsky-like figure 
>> comes along and imposes widespread "agreement by authority"). So care 
>> has to be taken in interpreting WALS correlations, of course. But 
>> this is not a flaw in the design of the project.
>>
>> Typology cannot be based on some kind of "definitive" set of 
>> grammatical concepts, because there is no such list (or if there is, 
>> i.e. if UG exists after all, we're so far away from knowing what it 
>> is that it's irrelevant for practical purposes). Each language has 
>> its own categories, so typologists necessarily have to make up their 
>> comparative concepts that give them the most interesting results.
>>
>> (For more on this, see my paper "Comparative concepts and descriptive 
>> categories in cross-linguistic studies", on my website under "Papers 
>> and handouts".)
>>
>> Martin Haspelmath
>>
>> Esa Itkonen wrote:
>>> Dear Funknetters: By all accounts, World Atlas of Language 
>>> Structures (= WALS) is a monumental achievement. Still, two intrepid 
>>> Finnish linguists (= myself & Anneli Pajunen) have ventured to write 
>>> a 30-page commentary on it, available on the homepage below. Enjoy!
>>>
>>> Esa Itkonen
>>>
>>>
>>> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>>>   
>>
>
>



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