Concerning WALS, Darwin and butterflies

Martin Haspelmath haspelmath at eva.mpg.de
Fri Nov 14 11:20:53 UTC 2008


Hi Tom,

Tom Givon wrote:
> Do you really mean that WALS is what will put us on sound empirical 
> foundations? At long last? Gets one to wonder what myself and my 
> associates (let alone your guru Greenberg) have been doing  with our 
> finite earthly time all those pre-WALS years; now don't it?
I see WALS as a salient manifestation of Greenbergian and Givonian 
efforts of the last few decades. While Greenberg and Givón are not 
strictly speaking authors of WALS, their spirit permeates the entire work.
> As to how far we are in linguistics from the Darwinian stage: It seems 
> to me that you are implying something that for me translates as 
> follows: Darwin was hopelessly premature in delving into a theoretical 
> explanation of variation in Biology, because in his time many species 
> and sub-species of butterflies had not yet been described, let alone 
> discovered. Well, here is what I bet you Darwin would have said to 
> that: "I had my finches, and apparently they were enough, I didn't 
> need all those the extra butterflies to come up with the theory of 
> evolution by natural (adaptive) selection".
I think WALS is something like Darwin's finches, plus the other things 
he knew about comparative zoology and botany. But note that Darwin's 
thinking was not only derived from a few finches -- he had a huge 
previous literature to test his ideas on, including many descriptive 
volumes he wrote himself. The finches were more like textbook examples.

So Darwin was NOT premature, precisely because an empirical foundation 
already existed when he came along.
> If  the good folks of WALS  want to make a serious  claim that it is 
> premature to do theoretical (explanatory)  linguistics, and thus to 
> justify the time & money poured into their admirable enterprise, well, 
> all they have to do is convince those of us who know just a bit about 
> cross-language diversity (and also about the major source of such 
> diversity--diachrony) that they are finding new types of variants, 
That's pretty easy -- the linguistics literature is full of premature 
generalizations (such as "Kayne's generalization", which holds for 
Spanish, Italian, and French, but breaks down with Modern Greek). Of 
course, linguists with a Greenbergian or Givonian background are not so 
likely to fall into this trap, but WALS is addressed to the entire field 
of theoretical linguistics.

In addition, many typologists of the younger generation (who 
increasingly are trained in statistics) find it important to adopt a 
quantitative perspective, where a single counterexample does not destroy 
a correlation. For a quatitative perspective, one needs many languages. 
This is also an approach adopted by some comparative biologists. (In 
biology, this work is not very prominent, because genetics is currently 
occupying center stage, but in linguistics we have nothing corresponding 
to genetics.)

Best,
Martin

> Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>> If you want to compare Chomsky with someone, I think the best analogy 
>> is Socrates -- he asked a number of new questions in a very serious 
>> way, without providing answers (Socrates also had clashes with 
>> authority, rather fatal ones).
>>
>> Comparative biology became an empirically-based science long before 
>> Darwin, but it was extremely difficult to make sense of the variation 
>> until a new way of thinking became possible. Maybe that is the case 
>> with comparative linguistics, too. It seems that we are still very 
>> far from the Keplerian, Galilean or Darwinian stage.
>>
>> The World Atlas of Language Structures is primarily an attempt to put 
>> comparative linguistics on an empirical foundation. Until recently, 
>> it was often based on Platonic or Aristotelian speculation, like 
>> medieval biology.
>>
>> Martin
>>> At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>>> snip..
>>>
>>>>  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.
>>>
>>> A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and 
>>> a comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a 
>>> discipline-changing body of work (subsequently elevated into a 
>>> theory of everything). Both also had clashes with authority although 
>>> of a rather different kind. Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or 
>>> Einstein but to be a Galileo is not to be sniffed at.

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

Glottopedia - the free encyclopedia of linguistics
(http://www.glottopedia.org)



More information about the Funknet mailing list