Cross-linguistic categories - what are they?

[Balthasar Bickel]

I agree that comparative notions are like technical instruments for capturing distributions --- in fact I made this very point explicitly a few years ago -- see http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~bickel/research/papers/universals_cels_bb.pdf). As such, they are clearly "conventionalist".
But I don't understand how this is in opposition to being "psychologically real". The way I understand it, something is psychologically real if it can be demonstrated through psychological research, i.e. captured by the metalanguage of psychology, a disciplines which uses "conventionalist" instruments just like we do.

From this point of view, the question of whether our descriptive concepts are psychologically real or not is a purely empirical one. Sometimes, linguists' terms correspond well to the terms you need in order to best describe what's going on in the brain (i.e. what we can measure through e.g. ERPs etc.) or what drives pathways of acquisition, sometimes not. Given this, we are still well-advised to try and develop "psychologically adequate" metalanguages.

Balthasar



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On Mar 12, 2010, at 9:11 AM, Martin Haspelmath wrote:

> 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.
>> 
>> 
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