[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Sun Feb 28 01:10:29 UTC 2016

Why is it that phonemic is etic and phonetic is emic? I've always thought this curious.

Matthew

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-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Seidel [frank.zidle at gmail.com]
Received: Friday, 29 Jan 2016, 6:46am
To: Martin Haspelmath [haspelmath at shh.mpg.de]; LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org [LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org]
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Dear all,
there are obviously several different understandings of the terms emic and etic at work here.

If one considers only the description of a particular language, I would argue that the emic and etic distinction applies to, e.g., a morpheme and its variant realizations. Thus the a morpheme indicating “plural” in English is syst-emic and its various realizations as [s] (bats) or [z] (mugs) are etic allomorphs, i.e. as an observer would hear them ‘objectively’ without meaning attached. The speaker ‘hears’ ‘plural’, or rather ‘multitude of’ and in some contexts maybe some other concepts e.g. “a collective of’. All of whose meanings are then subsumed as plural by the analyst. (It should be noted here that the choice to subsume the different semantic notions indicated by this morpheme is not based on emic conceptions, but on a notion that things like this are usually called plural in languages (no matter if the exact circumstances vary)).

This understanding shares with emic and etic as they are applied to different research approaches the change in perspective (from inside vs. from outside) but lacks the preeminence of the notion of subjectivity and preestablished notions. Etic designates an approach that uses an outside framework or outside comparative concepts and emic designates an approach that lets the patterns emerge during research, which in relation to linguistics, if understood very narrowly would preclude elicitative fieldwork and require a focus on varied discourse data (hence documentary linguistics cf. Woodbury 2003, cited in previous contribution). However, these need not be considered to be mutually exclusive approaches in fact it is probably impossible to achieve solely etic or absolutely emic perspectives.

In this sense to be a little bit more precise since any linguist (even an native speaker) comes with their own either explicit or implicit notions to his/her research there is always an etic element in any linguistic description owing to the subjectivity of the research. An analysis is never solely based on simply emerging patterns. In some cases it is possible to get closer to emic views as Conklin (1962) did for Hanunóo, but this in practice does not hold for a grammatical description as a whole.

There are, of course many more understandings as the term has spread through many disciplines.

Conklin, Harold. 1962. Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies. In Fred W. Housholder and Sol Saporta (eds), Problems in Lexicography. Bloomington: Indinana. (I think this is the correct reference, couldn’t look it up properly)

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 6:59 AM, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
Thanks to Doris for bringing up the etic/emic contrast. Yes, there are important similarities, as I briefly note in my 2010 paper (§7, referring to Reesink's 2008 paper in Studies in Language: " Lexicon and syntax from an emic viewpoint").

I agree with Bill and Matthew that not all comparative concepts are etic, but all etic concepts can probably be used for comparison. In general, I would use the term "comparative concept" very broadly. The nonverbal stimuli as used in comparative lexical research by fieldworkers (e.g. Meira, Levinson et al. 2003, and much related work) are kinds of comparative concepts (called "etic grids" by these authors), but so are more abstract concepts like "root" (e.g. as defined in my 2012 paper on word-classes) or serial verb construction (as defined in my 2016 paper). The latter are of course not etic.

Matthew's example of Ian Maddieson's WALS chapters on sound distinctions is interesting, because it's actually somewhat questionable to what extent phonemes can be compared across languages. In APiCS, we decided to compare segments at the level of "salient allophones", not phonemes (see http://apics-online.info/parameters, select feature type: segment). These are closer to etic distinctions.

Best,
Martin

On 27.01.16 21:35, William Croft wrote:
There are definitely similarities between etic and emic on the one hand, and comparative concepts and language-specific categories on the other. I would say there are some differences as well.

Etic categories, in the morphosyntactic domain, are more like "purely semantic/functional" comparative concepts. For example, the property concept classes of dimension, value, age. But Martin argued for some comparative concepts that are hybrids, including (crosslinguistically valid) formal properties. So for instance for me, "adjective" is a hybrid comparative concept that is whatever construction expresses modification of a referent by a property concept such as one of those classes just named. (Or more accurately, the head of such a construction, with 'head' defined functionally as in Croft 2001, ch. 7.) And perhaps that construction instantiates a particular formal strategy, say the linker strategy, for adjectives. This is another hybrid comparative category. Neither adjective nor linker strategy are etic categories in the usual sense.

Emic categories look a lot more like language-specific categories. But I would say that language-specific categories are construction-specific as well. So we might identify an adjective construction using a linking strategy in the language we're describing, based on modification by certain property concepts. Then we can ask, what other lexical concepts can be used in this construction for modification? We'll come up with a set of lexical concepts, possibly not all the property concepts, possibly including non-property concepts, that can be used in this construction for modification. Then we could use the capitalized term Adjective to describe this construction-specific word class, because we used the comparative concept adjective to single out this language-specific construction. This would make it easier for someone else reading our language description to find the adjective (lower-case, comparative concept) construction in that language, for comparative typological or other purposes. As Johanna said, this is what descriptive grammarians generally do, even if they aren't thinking about the issues in the way described here, and so typologists generally don't have a problem using descriptive grammars (and the prose description in the grammar can tell us if things are different). But Adjective is not adjective; we haven't "discovered" an adjective class in the language, because adjective (lower case) is not a language-specific word class; it is a type of comparative concept.

Best wishes,
Bill

On Jan 27, 2016, at 1:05 PM, Frank Seidel <frank.zidle at gmail.com<mailto:frank.zidle at gmail.com>> wrote:

Dear all,
Doris' point about etic and emic perspectives clarified one more issue about comparative concepts and language-particular categories for me. Since two linguists working on a same language might arrive at different analyses about phenomena found, so-called language particular categories are at the same time analyst particular categories and I would thus still consider them to be etic perspectives on a language.

Furthermore, and I might understand Martin Haspelmath's (2010) paper wrongly, but the way he talked about grammatical concepts I understood them to be more akin to 'ad hoc' concepts/categories (e.g. things that you need to build a house). You need them for a particular purpose, but they are otherwise useless. In this case they are concepts that are used to meaningfully compare structural-semantic/functional/communicative aspects of languages.

>From a purely terminological standpoint I would argue that the difference between a concept and a category is that the concept helps you identify a set of items and basically 'turns' into a category once a set of items has been identified. So comparative concepts 'turn' into categories once items in different languages have been found. These concepts are, however, somewhat useless to use as an argument for a language particular analysis. Thus if one finds a group of "lexemes that denote a descriptive property and that can be used to narrow the reference of a noun" in a particular language the language cannot be argued to have a grammatical category adjectives based on this. This is despite the fact that once I identify such a group of lexemes in a particular language, I still have a category. This category is just useless for language particular analysis. They can only be viewed as adjectives for a comparative purposes. The question here would be, if this definition of a comparative concept adjective should be used for all comparative purposes involving the idea of adjective?

>From a methodological standpoint, then, if I look for a set of 'adjectives' as comparatively defined in a language and then try to find language internal evidence that this group of items (or at least a part of this group) can be argued for as being its own language specific category adjective, can I say that I have let the language show itself to me?

Thanks all for reading.

Frank

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 11:54 AM, Everett, Daniel <DEVERETT at bentley.edu<mailto:DEVERETT at bentley.edu>> wrote:
Good point, Doris. At the risk of harping on a single subject, in my forthcoming Chicago press book the etic/emic distinction plays a major role in the empiricist theories of language and culture that I try to develop. These are very important ideas that have been misunderstood and under-estimated for decades outside of some circles.

Dan

On Jan 22, 2016, at 1:13 PM, Dlpayne at uoregon.edu<mailto:Dlpayne at uoregon.edu> <dlpayne at uoregon.edu<mailto:dlpayne at uoregon.edu>> wrote:

It seems to me that "comparative concept" in Martin's usage is close (if not identical) to what is called "etic " while language specific "descriptve categories" are "emic cagegories" as discussed by Keneth Pike abd used in anthropology long ago, with the additional understanding that we are talking about conceptual notions of potential relevance to morohosyntax / discourse (not just to sound or eg. "marriage" in anthropology, etc.)

Aren't these the same kind of distinctions just under new names by a (somewhat) new generation?

Doris Payne

-------- Original message --------
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts
From: Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu<mailto:dryer at buffalo.edu>>
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
CC: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Paolo’s comment here illustrates very well how wings is a comparative concept.

The primary motivation for my arguing against crosslinguistic categories in my 1997 paper was that linguists would debate for marginal cases whether a category in a particular language was an instance of the crosslinguistic category, but I argued that such debates were merely terminological, not substantive.

Claiming that bats don’t have wings is an example of the same phenomenon: it all depends on how you define wings.  Paolo is assuming one definition, but many people would assume a different definition.  There is no “right” definition.

Matthew

On 1/22/16 10:28 AM, Paolo Ramat wrote:
Hi David,
your comparison of linguistic facts with bats helps me to clarify (and this will be the end of my interventions!) my point: actually, bats don’t have wings but a kind of membrane that FUNCTIONS like wings which prototypically are formed by an ordered collection of plumes. Similarly, in the Lat. construct me poenitet the accus. me has the same FUNCTION as Engl. I in I‘m sorry or Germ. mir in  Es tut mir leid (call it Patient or Experiencer). Once we have established what wings, PAT or EXP are, we can draw more or less narrow comparisons between bats, bees, eagles etc. and between  the theta roles implemented by me, I, mir etc.
Consequently, I agree with your conclusions thet “comparative concepts [build on linguists’ analysis of languages] have a place in the grammatical descriptions of individual languages” and that “the ontological diversity of language-specific categories and comparative concepts should be present within the grammatical descriptions of individual languages” .  The process is twofold : from the empirical observation of bats, bees, eagles etc. and Lat.,Engl.,Germ etc. to the creation of comparative concepts (call them abstract tertia comparationis) back to the analysis of flying objects and of linguistic extant data.

Best,
Paolo

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
Prof.Paolo Ramat
Academia Europaea
Università di Pavia
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia)

From: David Gil<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 3:14 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

I've greatly enjoyed following this high-quality discussion: thank you all.

In particular, I think the discussion has helped me to articulate an unease that I've always felt about the distinction between language-specific categories and what Martin calls comparative concepts.  I agree wholeheartedly that we need to distinguish between, say, the Latin Dative, and a typologically-informed concept of dative that the Latin Dative may or may not instantiate to whatever degree.  (I also agree that it's unfortunate that we don't have enough distinct terms to assign to all of these different things, and that we sometimes end up falling prey to the resulting terminological confusion.)  Where I think I part ways with some of my colleagues is that I do not accept that language-specific categories and comparative concepts constitute two distinct and well-defined ontological types.

Let's take the wing analogy.  I agree that a statement such as "bats have wings" may be of more interest for somebody interested in comparative evolution than for a specialist in bats — in that sense it resembles a comparative concept in linguistics.  But still, bats do have wings, even though they may differ in many ways from those of birds or bees.  And yes, ontologically bat wings are a very different type of thing than, say, whatever feature of bat DNA it is that "generates" those wings.  However, these different ontological types all have a place within a description of bats, even though a bat specialist might be more interested in the DNA while the comparative evolutionist will be more interested in the wings.

Getting back to languages, let's consider three hypothetical (and somewhat simplistic cases of) languages that Matthew would classify as having SVO basic word order:

Language A:  has well-defined Ss and Os, and specific linearization rules that put the S before the V and the O after it.

Language B:  has well-defined Ss and Os, but no linearization rules that refer to them; instead it has specific linearization rules that put the A before the V and the P after it.

Language C:  does not have well-defined Ss and Os, but has specific linearization rules that put the A before the V and the P after it.

In Matthew's WALS chapter, all three languages are characterized as SVO; this is an example of what Martin and others call a comparative concept.  And as we have found out over the last several decades, basic word order is a very useful comparative concept for us to have.  However, our three hypothetical languages arrive at their SVO order in very different ways, giving rise to the impression that the respective bottom-up language-specific descriptions of the three languages will share no common statement to the effect that they have SVO word order.  And indeed, adequate bottom-up language-specific descriptions of these three languages should look very different, reflecting the very different provenances of their SVO word orders.

However, I would like to suggest that there is also a place within the bottom-up language-specific description of each of the three languages for some kind of statement to the effect that the language has SVO word order (in the sense of Matthew's WALS chapter).  Of course this is a different kind of statement to the ones previously posited, making reference to different levels of description.  But we're already used to multiple levels of description within language-specific descriptions, for example when we talk about Ss and Os but also As and Ps, topics and comments, and so forth.  So there is no good reason not to allow for a WALS-style word-order category such as SVO not to be written into the grammatical descriptions of each of our hypothetical three languages, even if in some cases it may be "derivative" or "epiphenomenal", and even if in some cases it is of relatively little interest to language specialists. (Though as Matthew pointed out earlier on in this thread, the basic word order facts of a language have implications regarding other properties of the language in question even in those cases where the basic word order is "derivative" of other factors.)

So what I'm suggesting, then, is that so-called comparative concepts have a place in the grammatical descriptions of individual languages.  This is not to deny that comparative concepts are different kinds of creatures, which — by definition — are of greater relevance to cross-linguistic comparison than to the understanding of individual languages.  It follows that the ontological diversity of language-specific categories and comparative concepts should be present within the grammatical descriptions of individual languages.  Some will object to this, but I have no problem with the proposition that a good description of a language will be ontologically heterogeneous, e.g. containing some statements that are psychologically real and others that are not.  (I note here Eitan's suggestion earlier in this thread that some comparative concepts may also be cognitively real.)

Finally, and somewhat tangentially, a practical consideration:  a good reference grammar, while describing a language on its own terms without imposing categories from outside, should at the same time maintain a parallel reader-friendly typologically-informed narrative, one of whose major tasks is to mention all of those cross-linguistically familiar typological categories — e.g. case marking, agreement, gender, and so forth — that are absent from the language, if only to reassure the reader that the author didn't just omit mention of them for reasons of space, lack of interest, or whatnot.

--
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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University of Florida
Center for African Studies at the University of Florida
427 Grinter Hall - PO Box 115560
Gainesville, FL 32611-5560
Tel: 352.392.2183
Fax: 352.392.2435

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