<div dir="ltr">Hi Hedwig,<div><br></div><div>What sometimes happens with putative rarities is that someone claims to have found a rarity and then others say 'hey, I have that in my language too.' This might be in part due to descriptive linguists taking existing typological accounts as a kind of baseline ('in Siewierska's sample, there are no languages with property X'), but obviously the number of languages that <i>aren't</i> in typological samples is much greater than the number of languages that are, so it's reasonable that what looks like a rarity might turn out to be more common or less restricted in terms of distribution. But without the initial claim that a given property is rare, the whole issue might never come up. To my mind, this means that it's worthwhile to make explicit claims about the rarity of linguistic properties. </div><div><br></div><div>As for the question of spoken data, I'm not sure what you mean by 'some features affected by genre seem like they're something else'. But if you mean that some usage features might be treated as grammatical or something like this, then it might be worthwhile to note that there's recently been a move to treat discourse phenomena as language-specific descriptive categories rather than as 'instantiatiations' of universal discourse categories (e.g., focus, topic, etc.). Some linguists have claimed that language-specific devices have very particular functions, and only secondarily give rise to topic or focus readings. Some recent examples of this are:</div><div><br></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000"><span style="line-height:18.233600616455078px">Matić, D., & Wedgwood, D. </span><span class="" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;line-height:18.233600616455078px">(2013).</span><span style="line-height:18.233600616455078px"> The meanings of focus: The significance of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis.</span><span class="" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;line-height:18.233600616455078px"> Journal of Linguistics,</span><span style="line-height:18.233600616455078px"> </span><span class="" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;line-height:18.233600616455078px">49</span><span style="line-height:18.233600616455078px">, 127-163.</span><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#000000"><span style="line-height:18.233600616455078px">Ozerov, P. (2015). </span><span style="line-height:1.3em">Information structure without topic and focus.</span><span style="line-height:1.3em">Differential Object Marking in Burmese. Studies in Language 39/2, 386-423.</span></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="line-height:16.899999618530273px">-- (2015). Telling a story with (almost) no tenses: the structure of written narrative in Burmese. Linguistics 53/5: 1169-1201.</span></font></div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Eitan</div><div> </div><div><br></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 Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 6:01 AM, Hedvig Skirgård <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:hedvig.skirgard@gmail.com" target="_blank">hedvig.skirgard@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">(My private worry is that some of these things are not as rare as they seem, simply because the conventions of language description are so different across language families, areas and just over time and theoretical schools. That coupled with the fact that modern descriptivist collect more spontaneous natural data than previous researchers might have, so that some features that might be effected by genre seem like they're something else. All of this combined with some other considerations make me want to restrict the type of questions one can ask given a certain kind of data. I trust grammars to be able to represent word order quite well, but not focus constructions in narratives for example.)<div><br></div><div>/Hedvig</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt"><b>Hedvig Skirgård</b><br>PhD Candidate<br><span style="color:rgb(196,89,17)">The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity</span><u></u><u></u></span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt">ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language</span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt">School of Culture, History and Language<br>College of Asia and the Pacific<u></u><u></u></span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt">Rm 4203, H.C. Coombs Building (#9)<br>The Australian National University<u></u><u></u></span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt">Acton ACT 2601<u></u><u></u></span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt">Australia<br><br>Co-char of Public Relations</span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt">International Olympiad of Linguistics</span></p><p style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt"><a href="http://www.ioling.org" target="_blank">www.ioling.org</a></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5">On 27 January 2016 at 13:05, Matthew Dryer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dryer@buffalo.edu" target="_blank">dryer@buffalo.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br></div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="h5">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div>Peter,<br>
<br>
As I said in a recent posting, I personally find the unusual
phenomena MORE interesting than the dominant patterns. That is
partly because I simply find them intrinsically interesting,
partly because they add to the evidence how different languages
can be, and partly because they so often show that what was
thought to be an absolute universal is actually statistical. My
hunch is that these unusual phenomena represent a tiny random
subset of what is possible but unusual in language, that there are
many equally likely phenomena that by accident are not attested in
the world's languages.<span><font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
Matthew</font></span><div><div><br>
<br>
On 1/26/16 5:38 PM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:<br>
</div></div></div><div><div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>Thank you, Matthew, for clarifying this - but nonetheless, I
maintain that even those "non-dominant" patterns whose rarity is
apparently due to some kind of "functional deficience" (e.g.
non-efficiency in Hawkins' terms) or whatever else we consider
"linguistic reasons", deserve close attention.</div>
<div>Just to give an example I myself consider to be both striking
and telling, the system of "multiple case marking" in Kayardild
as described by Evans (1995) and insightfully reanalyzed by
Erich Round (2013) is clearly a typological rarissimum, but on
the other hand I believe that it is revealing of the deep
mechanisms possibly at work in all or most languages. Even if
you are reluctant to accept the last point which might sound
"generativist", I would still argue that there is nothing
"unnatural" or "dysfunctional" in the grammatical system of
Kayardild, just to the contrary, this is one of the most
transparent and logical linguistic systems ever attested. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Round, Erich R. (2013). Kayardild Morphology and Syntax. OUP.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Best regards,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Peter</div>
<div> </div>
<div>-- <br>
Peter Arkadiev, PhD<br>
Institute of Slavic Studies<br>
Russian Academy of Sciences <br>
Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow<br>
<a href="mailto:peterarkadiev@yandex.ru" target="_blank">peterarkadiev@yandex.ru</a><br>
<a href="http://www.inslav.ru/ob-institute/sotrudniki/279-peter-arkadiev" target="_blank">http://www.inslav.ru/ob-institute/sotrudniki/279-peter-arkadiev</a></div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div>26.01.2016, 17:21, "Matthew Dryer" <a href="mailto:dryer@buffalo.edu" target="_blank"><dryer@buffalo.edu></a>:</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div>
<p><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Courier">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."<span> </span>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.<span> </span>Best,<span>
</span>Peter</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Matthew</p>
<br>
On 1/26/16 7:10 AM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>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</pre>
</blockquote>
</div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
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