Re categorization

[Edith A Moravcsik]

Here are some thoughts regarding four points that arose in the recent exchange among Esa Itkonen, Bill Croft, Martin Haspelmath, Balthasar Bickel, and Tom Givón regarding categorization. I am sorry for the length; I am labeling the sections by topic for easier orientation.

(a)	THE LEGITIMACY OF CATEGORIZATION
Following Bill C., Martin H. and Matthew Dryer, one might question the legitimacy of crosslinguistic grammatical categories on grounds that the members of any one of these categories differ from each other. I cannot see why this is a problem. What the cognitive tool of category-formation accomplishes is legitimizing what would otherwise appear to be a paradox: that things can be both the same and not the same. As Cecil Brown has remarked, in categorization, we treat different things AS IF they were the same. The key to the idea is that things can be different in some respects but the same in other respect. Thus, as long as there is some likeness among entities, we are justified in assigning them to the same category without incurring a contradiction.

For example, adjectives are in many ways different in and across languages but if they are the same in at least one respect – whether purely semantic or semantic-and-formal (see Martin H.’s comment) – they form a legitimate category. Or, to take an example from outside language, the class concept “school” will include very different kinds of institutions even if it is applied just within a single culture and if it is applied across cultures, the differences are likely to be even greater; but as long as there is something is common to all instances, lumping them together for a given purpose is not contradictory.

(b)	CRITERIA FOR CATEGORIZATION
In an absolute sense, criteria of classification are arbitrarily (or, in Bill C.’s terminology, opportunistically) chosen. However, there are two ways to justify them. First, if we choose criteria for categorization so that they serve a particular research goal, the choice becomes principled instead of being arbitrary. Second, the choice of classificatory criteria amounts to a hypothesis as to what might be a fruitful way of sorting things in a given domain (this I believe is Martin H.’s view). If a particular criterion leads to categories whose members turn out to have additional properties in common – i.e. to a cluster concept (cf. Isa I.’s paper) - the criterion has proven to be useful and is thus legit. 

For example, if the goal is to establish the crosslinguistic distribution of word-initial obstruent-liquid clusters, categorizing languages in terms of whether they or do not have #pl- is justified even though outside this goal, the criterion is just one of a huge number of other possible criteria.

(c)	LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC VERSUS COMPARATIVE CONCEPTS
It seems to me that Martin H. is right in saying that there are categories that are useful in crosslinguistic comparison but that do not play a role in individual language descriptions; but I don’t think this is necessarily so. For example, in a crosslinguistic study, the concept of argument alignment varying over accusative, ergative, and other types is important but in the grammar of a language that is, say, purely ergatively structured, the concept will not play any role. However, another concept, such as of subject-verb agreement, may be a useful category both in single-language grammars and also in a crosslinguistic typology – even if the details of the construction differ across languages. 

This seems to hold in other domains of inquiry as well. For example, if the goal is to determine what building materials are used for constructing schools in different cultures, the category of school-building materials ranging over brick, stone, wood, etc. is a crucial concept. However, in a culture where all buildings – whether schools or other structures - are made of bricks, the category of school-building material is irrelevant. This is in contrast with another criterion – say, the ages of children that are required to attend school – that will be relevant both to descriptions of individual cultures and those across cultures.

More generally, a category with various sub-categories is relevant for crosslinguistic study but not for a language that exemplifies only a single subcategory.

(d)	PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY
If we are interested in psychological reality, the question is: the psychological reality of what? The answer must be: not individual words and sentences but grammatical concepts and patterns. But if so, the study of the psychological reality of grammatical categories must be a separate task from establishing these categories to begin with. The conventionalist approach to grammatical categories, as cited by Esa I., is therefore necessary: without it, we have no handle on the objects whose psychological reality we want to study.

Labeling these distributionally and semantically arrived-at categories as fictions seems to me infelicitous. Something is fictional if it has no empirical basis; but this is not true for these categories. While, indeed, they do not reflect psychological reality, they are  based on facts of language structure. -  As Balthasar B. pointed out, whether there is or isn’t a match between these descriptive categories and those that emerge from the study of how people acquire, store, and use language is an empirical question.

Edith Moravcsik