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On 23/01/2016 18:45, Martin Haspelmath wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:56A34B9D.1060101@shh.mpg.de" type="cite">
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Edith Moravcsik asked: "It is impossible in principle for
constructions in two languages to be members of the same
descriptive category?" I would say yes, because descriptive
categories are set up on a language-specific basis
("distributionally", to use Bill Croft's word) for the purposes of
description (or analysis). Hypothetically one could imagine two
languages that have exactly the same grammar (but different
words), and in that case, one might say that they share
descriptive categories. Perhaps at a lower level, this situation
is actually found – so maybe with respect to the behaviour of
property words, Italian and Spanish are indeed close to identical.
In that case, it would not do any practical harm to say that they
have the same descriptive category. But we normally describe each
language separately (e.g. we do not skip the description of
Spanish adjective syntax and point to an already existing
description of the same facts in an Italian grammar), i.e. we
treat each grammar as an indivisible unique system.<br>
</blockquote>
In the following paper I argued that it is in fact possible to
compare purely formal constructions across languages:<br>
<br>
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<p class="ReferencesT" style="mso-pagination:widow-orphan
lines-together"><span lang="EN-US">Gil, David (2000) "Syntactic
Categories, Cross-Linguistic
Variation and Universal Grammar", in P. M. Vogel and B. Comrie
eds., <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Approaches to the
Typology of Word Classes</i>,
Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, Mouton, Berlin and
New York,
173-216.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<![endif]--><!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--><br>
I am aware that the above paper may strike many readers of this
thread as not too dissimilar from lots of formal generative
gibberish. But crucially, the syntactic categories that I define
there are based exclusively on distributional criteria, and are
blind to the semantics. Indeed, in different languages, the same
syntactic category may contain items of very different semantic
types. Crucially, in the context of the present discussion, the
syntactic categories posited therein are both valid for individual
languages and, at the same time, useful for, and in fact partly
motivated by, cross-linguistic comparisons.<br>
<br>
Contrary to many of my colleagues, I am actually more skeptical
about the cross-linguistic validity of semantic categories than I'm
about purely formal ones. (For example, the semantic category of
property denoting seems to me to be at least as problematical as the
morphosyntactic category of attributive expressions.)<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
David Gil
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-812-73567992
</pre>
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