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Dear typologists,<br>
<br>
The journal "Linguistic Typology" has recently published five papers
on "comparability", closely related to the four talks at the ALT
2017 panel in Canberra. They are available online "<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/lity/ahead-of-print/article-10.1515-lingty-2020-2055/article-10.1515-lingty-2020-2055.xml">ahead
of print</a>" (not yet part of a printed issue).<br>
<br>
Nick Evans has written the introductory paper, in which he says that
"comparability lies at the heart of linguistic typology", and that
"problems of comparability will never go away". (Oddly, none of
these five papers makes reference to the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/2016-January/subject.html#5038">LINGTYP
discussions</a> on comparing categories that took place in 2016,
and that were reflected by many papers in "Linguistic Typology",
e.g. by Croft, Dahl, Dryer, Gil, LaPolla, Moravcsik).<br>
<br>
I disagree with Nick, and in the blogpost linked below, I argue that
we have solved our comparability problem (which was caused by
naively following the Chomskyan idea of innate substantive
universals):<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2421">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2421</a><br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<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 Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig</pre>
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