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<DIV>Edith has rightly written:”<FONT face=Arial>Categorization, by its
</FONT><FONT face=Arial>very concept, does not require that the two things that
are lumped together share all of their properties.[...] </FONT><FONT
face=Arial>it does not matter if in many other ways, token of the proposed
category are different. Is it the case that even by this minimal criterion, all
descriptive categories are strictly language-specific? [...] </FONT><FONT
face=Arial>That there may be some differences is not relevant; the question for
categorization is only whether there are at least two properties that remain
constant.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>Thus, we come back to the concept of category prototypical examples/items I
proposed in my previous contribution to the present discussion : some items
belonging to the category VERB may lack some feature that is present in a
prototypical verbal form (say, different grams for singular and plural) but
share TAM distinctions. But nobody seems to take account of Wittgenstein’s
family resemblance and the prototype concept in our discussion.</DIV>
<DIV>Consequently, this raises again the problem alluded to by Edith:
“<FONT face=Arial>what categories EXIST and which are IMPOSED UPON THE DATA by
the analyst's specific purposes” (</FONT><FONT face=Calibri>and I may
again refer to my article </FONT><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN lang=EN-US
style='FONT-FAMILY: ; mso-ansi-language: en-us; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: it; mso-bidi-language: ar-sa'><EM>Linguistic
categories and linguists’ categorizations</EM>. “Linguistics” 37/1999:
157-80.)</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN lang=EN-US
style='FONT-FAMILY: ; mso-ansi-language: en-us; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: it; mso-bidi-language: ar-sa'></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN lang=EN-US
style='FONT-FAMILY: ; mso-ansi-language: en-us; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: it; mso-bidi-language: ar-sa'>Best</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN lang=EN-US
style='FONT-FAMILY: ; mso-ansi-language: en-us; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: it; mso-bidi-language: ar-sa'>Paolo</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
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<DIV> </DIV>
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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=edith@uwm.edu
href="mailto:edith@uwm.edu">Edith A Moravcsik</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, January 21, 2016 7:18 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=dryer@buffalo.edu
href="mailto:dryer@buffalo.edu">Matthew Dryer</A> ; <A
title=peterarkadiev@yandex.ru href="mailto:peterarkadiev@yandex.ru">Peter
Arkadiev</A> ; <A title=lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org
href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence</DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
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<P>Regarding the distinction between descriptive categories and comparative
concepts, there are three things that am unclear about.</P>
<P> </P>
<P>1/ HOW MUCH SIMILARITY IS ASSUMED TO BE NEEDED FOR
CATEGORIZATION?<BR> Given the proposal that descriptive
categories have no crosslinguistic validity, the question is how much
similarity</P>
<P> is required between similar constructions of two languages
before we can lumped them into a single category. Categorization, by its</P>
<P> very concept, does not require that the two things that
are lumped together share all of their properties. We use categories</P>
<P> so that once one property is identified for something,
another one is predictable and thus its occurrence is in a sense</P>
<P> explained. Thus a mutual or unidirectional implicational
relation between two properties is sufficient to justify a<BR></P>
<P> category and it does not matter if in many other ways,
token of the proposed category are different. Is it the case that even
by<BR> this minimal criterion, all descriptive categories are
strictly language-specific?<BR><BR>2/ THE VALIDITY DOMAIN OF DESCRIPTIVE
CATEGORIES<BR> As Martin Haspelmath has proposed,
descriptive categories differ across languages and as Bill Croft has proposed,
they are</P>
<P> different even across the constructions of a single
language. I think more discussion is needed on the domain
issue.<BR> Are descriptive categories different across
two related languages - e.g. adjectives in French and Italian -</P>
<P> as well as across two subsequent historical stages
of a language (e.g. Middle English and Modern English) and two dialects
or<BR> styles of a single language? What about two
sentences of a language? That there may be some differences is not relevant; the
question<BR> for categorization is only whether there
are at least two properties that remain constant.</P>
<P> </P>
<P>3/ IS THE ISSUE EMPIRICAL OR LOGICAL?</P>
<P> As Oesten Dahl has noted, it is important to
clarify whether some or all other scientific inquiries in various fields
also</P>
<P> distinguish between descriptive categories and
comparative concepts. How about cross-cultural studies, comparative</P>
<P> literature, comparative religion, and the
various fields of natural science? It seems implausible that the distinction</P>
<P> would be linguistics-specific. If it is not,
how is the distinction defined and utilized in other fields?<BR><BR>Regarding
the issue of what categories EXIST and which are IMPOSED UPON THE DATA by the
analyst's specific purposes, I find</P>
<P>the survey of this issue in the natural sciences very eye-opening as given by
Stephen Goldman's DVD series "The science wars. What scientist <BR>know and how
they know it" (available from the company "Great Courses", also known as "The
Teaching Company"). In it, Goldman <BR>runs through much of the history of
physics and related fields and the accompanying philosophical discussions to
demonstrate how <BR>different scientists and philosophers have assessed the
contributions of "the facts of reality" and of "the human mind" to scientific
proposals .<BR>There is a clearly some contribution from both sides but a
definite delimitation of each is elusive - a moving target.<BR></P>
<P> </P>
<P>Best,</P>
<P><BR>Edith Moravcsik<BR><BR>.<BR> <BR></P>
<P> </P>
<P> </P>
<P> <BR></P><BR><BR>
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<DIV id=divRplyFwdMsg dir=ltr><FONT style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt" color=#000000
face="Calibri, sans-serif"><B>From:</B> Lingtyp
<lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Matthew Dryer
<dryer@buffalo.edu><BR><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, January 20, 2016 7:54
PM<BR><B>To:</B> Peter Arkadiev;
lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org<BR><B>Subject:</B> Re: [Lingtyp] Structural
congruence</FONT>
<DIV> </DIV></DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV class=moz-cite-prefix>On 1/20/16 6:59 PM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:<BR></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">Going back to word order, if we say that a language
has prepositions we already know something about this language's grammar,
moreover, we are able to make predictions about what else can be found in this
language and with what probability, aren't we?</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<P
style='FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: "Times New Roman"; MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt'>Actually,
if we know that a language has prepositions, we can only make limited
predictions about the grammar of the language. If we know that a language has
prepositions, we can predict that it is either a language whose grammar
specifies the word order as VO or a grammar that has no rule governing the order
of verb and object but where the factors conditioning the choice between OV and
VO word order result in more frequent. But since the latter is not a fact about
the grammar, you can make fewer predictions if you restrict attention to
grammar.</P>
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