Cross-linguistic categories - what are they?

[Tom Givon]

Dear FUNK people,

I have been debating, and vacillating, whether to join in this 
discussion. First because Esa Itkonen had already raised the very same 
issues ca. a year ago, and we all had a spirited go at it. But mostly 
because this discussion reminds me of a book I have just finished 
reading, Dave Geary's "Male Female: The Evolution of Human Sex 
Differences". This may sound less-than-obvious to many of you, but the 
history of linguistics for the past 100 years is eerily reminiscent of 
the evolution of male coalitions in Homo sapiens, with inter-coalition 
warfare and intra-coalition power-struggles--and inevitable splits of 
new coalitions (see DeWaal's "Chimpanzee Politics", 1982).
Let's see: Bloomfield challenged his teacher Hermann Paul's broad-scoped 
functional-typological coalition and split it, in the process radically 
narrowing down the domain of investigation to structure on its own and 
"inductive generalizations". Then Chomsky challenged Bloomfied's 
structuralist coalition and split it, creating a variant of 
structuralism--but with apriori Platonic universals propped upon rather 
frail empirical legs. Soon, Ross-Lakoff-Postal-McCawley challenged 
Chomsky's coalition and pulled out the Gen Sem faction, challenging 
autonomous syntax but adding only semantics to the relevant explanartory 
mix.
Then a bunch of us in the 1970s banded together into a new coalition, 
enlarging the relevant domain of structure's connectivity to 
communicative function (discourse), cross-language typology (diversity), 
diachrony (emergence), neuro-cognition (the processor), ontogeny (child 
language) and phylogeny (evolution). We were deeply interested in 
universals, but only if they were explanatory and empirically-grounded. 
It never occurred to us that "theory" was a dirty word, only that 
"theory" was not synonymous with "formalism". Our notion of "theory" 
demanded both empirical foundations and explanatory connectivity. But we 
were also deeply interested in structure--how could a linguist not 
be?--provided it were studied and explained in its relevant broad 
connectivity. This was, transparently, a return to the wide-scoped 
agenda of Hermann Paul, even if we hadn't read his work. So now a new 
coalition of alpha males are splitting off and, in a reprise of 
Bloomfield's maneuver, are narrowing the domain once again. This history 
is, leastwise to me, profoundly depressing. Try as I might, I find it 
hard to tell scientific substance from coalitional warfare.
One of the worst features of Chomsky's legacy to linguistics is his 
extreme reductionism, his insistence that you are either an empiricist 
or a rationalist, an inductivist or a deductivist, a universalist or 
variationist, a theorist or a data-monger, a formalist or a 
functionalist--with no room in the middle. As Esa and many others have 
pointed out, these are false dichotomies in the methodology of science, 
where an intensive cyclic interaction takes place among multiple 
strategies. But Chomsky's reductionist gambit also mis-represents mature 
theory-building, where universality and variability are inseparable, 
being both the products of development (‛emergence') in diachrony, 
acquisition or evolution.
Perhaps some day we will remember to remember that neither the 
structure-function ‛semiotic' relation nor the conundrum of 
universality-diversity, nor the central role of development in mediating 
the inter-dependence between these seeming extremes, are specific to 
linguistics. They have all been noted long ago in biology and evolution. 
For a biologically-based phenomenon such as language/culture to cleave 
to one extreme against the other, and to periodically resurrect these 
tired old false dichotomies, is not only counter-productive. It is also, 
perversely enough, an unintended validation of Chomsky's disruptive agenda.

Peace, TG

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Esa Itkonen wrote:
> Dear Funknetters: A debate has been going on in recent years concerning the nature of cross-linguistic categories. Are they universally valid psychologically real entities or (nothing but) useful fictions? I think there is room for a third alternative, namely one that exemplifies - to use a very refined expression - "coherentist inductivism" à la Nicholas Rescher. This "third alternative" is expounded more fully on my homepage, in the article 'Concerning the role of induction in typological linguistics', which is at the moment the latest entry in the list "available as full texts". This is the written version of a talk that will be given at the 4th Language - Culture - Mind conference, to be held in Turku (Finland), June 21-23, 2010. 
>
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>