[Lingtyp] What's the point of the phonological phrase? (and some questions about p-linguistics)

[William Croft]

Most of us seem to agree that a language should be “described in its own terms”, and that a description of a language should “motivated by a language itself”, to use Martin’s phrase. And that that means not imposing on a language categories like those from generative grammar discussed in this thread.

But what does it mean to describe a language “in its own terms”? This brings up a range of theoretical issues apart from what set of grammatical categories should be used in its description.

First, should one use even language-specific categories for grammatical description? This presupposes a building-block model of language, where complex constructions are built out of lexical or morphological categories. Categories are defined distributionally, that is, by distribution of words or morphemes in larger constructions. But detailed distributional analysis shows that word/morpheme classes are not just language-specific but construction-specific. In this view, one shouldn’t impose the  building-block model of grammar on a language.

Second, what is it that we are describing when we are describing “a language”? Linguists are trained to find patterns or generalizations in linguistic data, either naturalistic or elicited (or both). We seek the “right” generalization, and our analyses are not supposed to “miss” a generalization. But another view is that one should describe a speaker’s knowledge about their language. Psycholinguistic research shows that not every speaker has the same knowledge about their language. So the generalizations found by a trained linguist may be an imposition on a language description in terms of speakers’ knowledge.

Another view is that “a language” is the product of the collective behavior of a speech community. Sociolinguistic research and research into sound production and verbalization shows that grammatical expression is highly variable and probabilistically conditioned on a wide range of factors. In this view, “a language” as a single set of rules or generalizations, even for a single speaker, is an imposition on language description.

“Describe a language in its own terms” doesn’t give much guidance for language description. In my opinion, a radical-constructional, usage-based analysis that also recognizes inter-individual variation in linguistic knowledge and community-level variation makes the fewest impositions on language description. This is of course a theoretical position, though one that I believe has strong empirical support.

Bill

On Jan 8, 2020, at 7:47 PM, Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

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On 07.01.20 11:42, TALLMAN Adam wrote:
The distinction between p-linguistics and g-linguistics is useful because it allows us to avoid potentially pointless debates about whether some purported "universal" category is really there in some language and just get on with description and comparison. But I don't think this means "anything goes" in p-linguistics. I think we should favor more surfacy descriptions if the abstract categories require analytic shortcuts to get off the ground. We should wonder whether our analyses in p-linguistics are just expositionally useful or whether they can be thought of as motivated generalizations across the grammar. To take an extreme example, I think it would be wrong to insist that a descriptions isn't "typologically informed" because it does not refer to phases, little vP structures, movement operations etc. But what distinguishes the "phonological phrase" and other categories from the prosodic hierarchy from these other ingredients from generative linguistics?

I don't think there's any difference, other than perhaps the explicitness of the innateness claim. However, generative grammarians (especially those of the younger generation) often say that they don't want to commit themselves to an innateness claim, which makes the difference even less clear.

So for some linguists, "typologically informed" may mean referring to "vP" or "uninterpretable features", while for others it may mean referring "phonological phrase" or "ergative alignment".

But if this leads them to describe a language in a way that is not motivated by the language itself, it is not the right way to go about description (or p-theory). There is no reason to assume that "vP" or "phonological phrase" will be applicable to any language other than the one it was originally employed for, and little reason to hope that this will eventually be shown (given the many unsuccessful attempts).

Best,
Martin

--
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig

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