[Lingtyp] Probabilistic typology vs. typology-based grammatical theory

Tue Jan 26 14:49:35 UTC 2016

Dear Peter, dear Matthew, dear all,

I agree with Peter’s statement – there may be all sorts of non-linguistic reasons that determine what may look like a rarum today (and probably wasn’t at some earlier stage in the human history). In fact, as is stated by Matthew, disentangling the different factors that motivate the patterns we find is crucial for typological research since its beginning. But maybe there is another aspect of rareness which is rarely discussed:

Let’s start with the commonly discussed aspect (e.g. in Evans & Levinson 2009 or Wohlgemut & Cysouw 2011 on rara and rarissima): A large number of rare phenomena are rare as far as the combination of features is concerned, like for instance numeral classifiers that inflect for definite/indefinite, number and size (diminutive, medium, augmentative) in Weining Ahmao (Gerner & Bisang 2008) but the ingredients/features/grammatical categories they combine with are well-known in principle. From such a perspective, they are not that rare and it may be possible to describe a scenario for their emergence.

Another type of rareness, the one I would like to point out here, is rare in a more fundamental way and is concerned with assumptions on concepts that can be grammaticalized in a language or assumptions on what constitues a language. Thus, Talmy’s (1985) question of why some domains are excluded from being grammatically relevant (e.g. the colour of the environment in which an utterance takes place, ...) or basic assumptions on complexity in language (e.g. Dan Everett’s research).

Both aspects of rareness are important but the second type may ultimately be more important or at least equally important for theories of what makes a human language.

Now, I was longer than I intended, but I hope this is of some interest. I very much enjoyed reading the comments so far.

All the best,

Walter Bisang

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 3:20 PM
To: Peter Arkadiev; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Probabilistic typology vs. typology-based grammatical theory

Matthew writes: "The rara are relevant to typological work in that they are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things, and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."  I think this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow "better" than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common might have well changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about frequencies of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.  Best,  Peter

I have devoted considerable effort in my published research discussing the problem that Peter describes, showing how it is often the case that a particular language type may be more frequent for nonlinguistic reasons and proposing ways to factor out these nonlinguistic factors. Thus what I mean by “dominant” does not mean more frequent, but more frequent for what are apparently linguistic reasons.

Matthew

On 1/26/16 7:10 AM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:

Matthew writes:
"The rara are relevant to typological work in that they are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things, and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."

I think this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow "better" than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common might have well changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about frequencies of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.

Best,

Peter

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