<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">I try to ban the word “abstract” from my student’s essays. It is unhelpfully polysemous. In the recent discussions here, it seems to be used in at least three ways -- though I think there is a family resemblance.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The first is Martin’s immediately below: a concept defined in terms without a straightforward connection to phonetic or semantic substance. This is a rather specialized use of “abstract”, albeit relevant to the current discussion.<br class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The second is roughly synonymous with “schematic” (as the cognitive linguists and some others use that term), i.e. a more general concept, i.e. one with fixed intension but broader extension. In my interpretation of David’s recent post, he is suggesting that a seemingly disjunctive description actually can be interpreted as a more schematic description that subsumes the phenomena initially described by a disjunctive definition. If so, then the relevant definition is no longer disjunctive. And it is of course true that definitions based directly on phonetic or semantic substance may be highly schematic.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The third seems synonymous with an essentialist category, with an essence that is only inferrable indirectly from the accessible accidents (in the philosophical sense). This use is the use I interpreted in some earlier posts, particularly Dan’s that I responded to.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The family resemblance is this. Highly schematic definitions often end up being vague and either too broad or difficult to apply consistently in particular cases -- so people could differ radically in how they apply it to specific linguistic cases, and there would not be much hope in adjudicating such disputes. Concepts defined without a straightforward connection to phonetic or semantic substance would also be hard to apply consistently and consensually (at least outside the core members of the formal syntactic community). And essentialist concepts are also hard to apply consistently and consensually.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Apologies for going back into the stratosphere with this post,</div><div class="">Bill<br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Nov 15, 2017, at 5:53 AM, Martin Haspelmath <<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" class="">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
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On 15.11.17 13:42, Eitan Grossman wrote:<br class="">
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<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" class=""><span class="">David
wrote:<br class="">
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<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" class=""> I would just add
that would-be substantive notions such as, say,
"sonorant consonant" or "kinship term" are themselves
every bit as abstract as purely formal notions such as
domains, or syntactic categories. (After all these
years working on Indonesian, I still can't make up my
mind whether it even HAS kinship terms ...)<span class=""><br class="">
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<div class="">I agree, and it strikes me that the term 'abstract' is
too loose to be useful without being careful about its
scope. "Sonorant consonant" involves several, perhaps many
layers, of abstraction. First of all, over individual
tokens of events in speech (and even the notion 'segment'
has been argued about in phonetics and phonology),
resulting in something like a phone [n] or a phoneme /n/
(the latter often involving another stage of abstraction)
within a particular language; so even descriptive
categories are abstractions.</div>
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<div class="">Comparing such such types across language involves even
more abstraction - and maybe we need a third type of
brackets for that kind of comparative concept. Bundling
together things like [m], [n], [l] and so on into
'sonorant' is yet another abstraction. And this goes all
the way up.</div>
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Yes, it's true: "abstract" is too broad – what I mean is concepts
(such as zero, or transformation, or rule ordering, or phonological
domain, or syntactic category) that don't have a straightforward
connection to phonetic or semantic substance. (All of Matthew's
examples inhis recent message are substantive in this sense.)<br class="">
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One might of course try to typologize on the basis of such
non-substantive notions (e.g. languages with zero or languages
without zero, languages with "late merge" vs. languages with "early
merge", languages with syntactic categories and categoryless
languages), but usually such typologies don't work well, if at all.<br class="">
<br class="">
(Incidentally, it's very odd to say that "even descriptive
categories are abstractions" – because descriptive categories CAN
EASILY be very abstract/nonsubstantive, while comparative concepts
must normally be more substantive. It's the substantive aspects that
carry over to other languages, not the abstractions. Concepts like
transformations and zeroes are important for description, but not
for typology. In my view, this is the main reason for the failure of
generative typology.)<br class="">
<br class="">
Martin<br class="">
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig
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