Cross-linguistic categories - what are they?

[Martin Haspelmath]

I agree with most of Bill's points, but I think that crosslinguistically 
valid semantic categories are not sufficient for typological comparison. 
Sometimes we want to make generalizations such as "ergative case is 
always overtly coded", and "ergative case" cannot be defined in purely 
semantic terms. Or we want to make generalizations about tense, and 
again, tense cannot be defined (or at least is not normally defined) in 
purely semantic terms -- rather, tense is a verbal category with 
particular semantic properties. So I think Newmeyer (2007) (in 
Linguistic Typology) made a valid point when he said that typology 
cannot just be based on semantic categories.

Thus, our comparative concepts are not limited to semantically-based 
concepts, and include concepts that are in part formally based. (This 
also applies to phonology, where comparative concepts such as "syllable" 
are not purely phonetically based.) The way I see it, these comparative 
concepts (and in fact also the semantically-based comparative concepts) 
are used by typologists as instruments for measuring cross-linguistic 
variation. They are analogous to measuring instruments in other 
sciences, and like these, they are conventional (hence Itkonen's term 
"conventionalist"). In my paper (which is, incidentally, available from 
my website), I also say that the comparative concepts are "arbitrary" 
(following Lazard).

If somebody proposes a definition of "ergative" that is different from 
mine, this is not a disagreement of substance, it's just s different 
comparative concept that is given the same name. (This is very different 
from the generative view, where categories such as "ergative" are taken 
to be part of UG, so disagreements about them are disagreements of 
substance.)

Greetings,
Martin

Bill Croft schrieb:
> Esa Itkonen's comment (and paper) does not consider another 
> alternative, namely that the notion of crosslinguistic formal 
> categories is a counterproductive fiction (the only options he offers 
> are "psychologically real entity" and "useful fiction"). There are a 
> number of misinterpretations of my position and that of Haspelmath in 
> Itkonen's paper.
>
> I do not subscribe to a "conventionalist" view of crosslinguistic 
> formal categories; I argue that they do not exist at all, not just in 
> Radical Construction Grammar but in a number of follow-on papers 
> (Croft 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010). This is the same position taken by 
> Martin Haspelmath in a passage from an unpublished 2008 paper cited by 
> Itkonen: "the adoption of categorial universalism has actually 
> impeded, not facilitated, crosslinguistic research".
>
> Itkonen presents some quotations from Haspelmath's paper and claims 
> they are contradictory. In fact they present a coherent and consistent 
> position, one which I also advocate and is part of the typological 
> method: crosslinguistic formal linguistic categories are invalid, but 
> crosslinguistic comparison can be based on semantic categories which 
> are crosslinguistically valid - albeit in terms of fine-grained 
> definitions of situation types, not broad conceptual categories like 
> "IN [containment]" (see Croft 2001, chapter 3; Croft to appear a, b; 
> Croft and Poole 2008:31-33).
>
> I do not reject the distributional method (Croft 2001:45-46; Croft 
> 2010:344-45). It is the only valid method of formal linguistic 
> analysis, if done carefully and thoroughly - that is, not ignoring 
> distributional facts that don't match up or don't match expectations. 
> I do reject the opportunistic use of selective distributional facts to 
> support categories assumed to exist a priori.
>
> Finally, and most importantly, abandoning crosslinguistic formal 
> categories allows typologists to develop valild methods and concepts 
> to understand crosslinguistic diversity and universals. The chief 
> method is the semantic map model, which is basically a 
> multidimensional generalization of implicational hierarchies. It has 
> been used productively by many typologists including Lloyd Anderson, 
> Suzanne Kemmer, Martin Haspelmath, Leon Stassen, Johan van der Auwera, 
> Andrej Malchukov, Nikolaus Himmelmann & Eva Schultze-Berndt, and 
> others to whom I apologize for not remembering to name here. 
> Multidimensional scaling can be used in order to extend the 
> applicability of the semantic map model to larger and more complex 
> datasets (Croft and Poole 2008, Croft to appear a, b). MDS has been 
> used in this way by Stephen Levinson & Sergio Meira, Michelle Feist 
> and Steven Clancy; Melissa Bowerman & Asifa Majid have used related 
> multivariate techniques for the same purposes. The semantic map model 
> is an empirical inductive method, but it does not presuppose 
> crosslinguistic formal categories.
>
> Bill Croft
>
>
> Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Gammar: syntactic theory in 
> typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
>
> ------. 2005. Word classes, parts of speech and syntactic 
> argumentation [Commentary on Evans and Osada, Mundari: the myth of a 
> language without word classes]. Linguistic Typology 9.431-41.
>
> ------. 2007. Beyond Aristotle and gradience: a reply to Aarts. 
> Studies in Language 31.409-30.
>
> ------. 2009. Methods for finding language universals in syntax. 
> Universals of language today, ed. Sergio Scalise, Elisabetta Magni and 
> Antonietta Bisetto, 145-64. Berlin: Springer.
>
> ------. 2010. Ten unwarranted assumptions in syntactic argumentation. 
> Language usage and language structure, ed. Kasper Bøye and Elisabeth 
> Engberg-Pedersen, 313-50. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
>
> ------. To appear a. Relativity, linguistic variation and language 
> universals. CogniTextes.
>
> ------. To appear b. Exemplar semantics. To appear in a volume ed. 
> Seana Coulson. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and 
> Information.
>
> ------ and Keith T. Poole. 2008. Inferring universals from grammatical 
> variation: multidimensional scaling for typological analysis. 
> Theoretical Linguistics 34.1-37.
>
>