<div dir="ltr"><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Dear all,</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">Thanks for this fascinating discussion!</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">I've always found the distinction between descriptive categories and comparative concepts to be extremely helpful, and have thought a bit about some of the issues that Edith Moravcsik raises. If one takes the distinction seriously, then yes, adjectives in French and Italian are different descriptive categories, and so are the categories of two different stages of a language. In fact, types of historical changes (assimilation, pathways of grammaticalisation, etc.) are also comparative concepts, in a sense, since the individual processes of change in actual languages are usually distinct. </font></font></div><div><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></font></div><div><font color="#000000"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The distinction between descriptive categories and comparative concepts also helps to clarify the ways in which borrowings are integrated into a target language, as I've argued in a recent paper (</font><a href="https://www.academia.edu/13522922/Language-specific_transitivities_in_contact">https://www.academia.edu/13522922/Language-specific_transitivities_in_contact</a>). Unlike Martin Haspelmath's definition of comparative concepts, I wonder if they might nonetheless be cognitively real in a sense, at least for multilingual speakers who often match structurally distinct descriptive categories due to a common function (as in Yaron Matras' notion of 'pivot').</font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">An additional advantage of the distinction between descriptive categories and comparative concepts that (I think) hasn't yet been pointed out here is that it can help typologists to maximize variables for cross-linguistic comparison. If two language-specific categories are taken to be instantiations of the same cross-linguistic category, the differences between them are usually downplayed. On the other hand, discussions often focus on whether something really 'is' an instance of Crosslinguistic Category X (say, noun incorporation). If it's similar enough but not identical to a category identified in another language, it can be dubbed 'Pseudo-Category X' (say, pseudo noun incorporation) and then we have a new term in linguistics.</font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">However, if one works with a broad comparative concept, everything that is not part of the definition can be turned into a variable. This seems to be especially valuable in frameworks like the one proposed by Balthasar Bickel in his 2010 and 2011 papers on multivariate analysis (e.g., </font><a href="http://www.zora.uzh.ch/57331/" target="_blank">http://www.zora.uzh.ch/57331/</a>).</div><div><br></div><div><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Although he is careful to distinguish his approach from those of Martin Haspelmath and Gilbert Lazard in these papers, I think that they are compatible, in that comparative concepts (e.g., 'clause linkage') can be starting points for multivariate analyses, and multivariate analyses tell us what properties actually cluster together. This kind of bottom-up perspective can turn up really new insights.</font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div>Best wishes,</div><div>Eitan</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Eitan Grossman<div>Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences<br></div><div>Hebrew University of Jerusalem</div><div>Tel: +972 2 588 3809</div><div>Fax: +972 2 588 1224</div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Martin Haspelmath <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
On 21.01.16 19:18, Edith A. Moravcsik wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div style="font-size:12pt;color:#000000;background-color:#ffffff;font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">3/
IS THE ISSUE EMPIRICAL OR LOGICAL?
<p> As Östen Dahl has noted, it is important to clarify whether
some or all other scientific inquiries in various fields also
distinguish between descriptive categories and comparative
concepts. How about cross-cultural studies, comparative
literature, comparative religion, and the various fields of
natural science? It seems implausible that the distinction
would be linguistics-specific. If it is not, how is the
distinction defined and utilized in other fields?<br>
</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Comparative concepts are widely used in other disciplines when a
comparative approach is adopted (I talked about this briefly in my
2010 paper, §9). I even found a paper published in a law journal
that uses the term "comparative concept"
(<a href="http://www.ejcl.org/22/art22-1.html" target="_blank">http://www.ejcl.org/22/art22-1.html</a>).<br>
<br>
Another example is the comparative study of folktales, where
researchers use the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson_classification_systems" target="_blank">Aarne-Thompson
classification index</a>". For biology and anthropology, I
recommend Charles Nunn's book "<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo11462152.html" target="_blank">The
comparative approach in evolutionary anthropology and biology</a>".
And for astronomy, the discussion about the classification of Pluto
(is it a planet or not?) shows that the comparative concepts in
other disciplines can also be pretty arbitrary. In comparative
religion, terms like "clergy" are clearly useful for comparison,
even though Catholic priests and Protestant ministers play very
different roles within the system of the religion (and thus the fact
that different denomination-specific terms are used for them is not
an accident).<br>
<br>
What may be special in linguistics is that the task of
analyzing/describing an individual language is so challenging and
absorbing. 90% of all linguists only ever study a single language, I
think, and even those that adopt a comparative approach are usually
very knowledgeable and concerned about analytical issues. Thus, our
analytical terms are very prominent, and for many centuries, people
have simply carried them over from one language (such as Latin) to
another one (such as French, Russian, Persian and so on). That there
is a problem with this dawned on them only in the early 20th century
– and it required deep concern with Native American languages to
understand it (those linguists who mostly focused on the bigger
languages blissfully ignored the Boasian insights, including the
generativists). I think in other fields, the confusion between
analytical and comparative concepts was not so much of a problem,
because the distinction was obvious – perhaps also because the
diversity is more obvious in other fields.<br>
<br>
(There my also be fields where separate comparative concepts may not
be needed, because comparison in terms of universal analytical
notions is sufficient. I'm thinking of chemistry – it's surely no
accident that Mark Baker compared linguistics to chemistry in his
utopian 2001 book "The atoms of language". It seems that chemists
have indeed been successful in figuring out the universal blueprints
of stuff, and they can compare kinds of stuff via the blueprints.)<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
<br>
<pre cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Beethovenstrasse 15
D-04107 Leipzig
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