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Erich Round mentions Spike's (2020) paper and suggests that Spike
showed that one need not distinguish descriptive categories and
comparative concepts – and here I would like to bring up the notion
of "homeostatic property concepts" that Dahl (2016) brought into the
discussion.<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Erich Round wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
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<ul style="margin-top:0cm" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="color:black;mso-list:l0 level1
lfo1">You’re right I want to “have it both ways”, to treat
languages as systems and compare them. This is a familiar
red line that has separated your views from other
typologists for a while now. I appreciate that you had an
argument couched in philosophical terms that seemed to lead
to your conclusion. Formulating such arguments is hard and
valuable work, but in my view Spike (2020) demonstrates that
the argument fails, predominantly because it’s based on
premises that turn out to be false. This is fine; typology
benefits from such debates: you raised some interesting
problems; Spike engaged with them and showed them to be
apparent, not real.<br>
</li>
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</blockquote>
<br>
Spike's discussion is mostly at an abstract philosophical level that
many linguists will find hard to understand (see some reactions from
me <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2410">here</a>
and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1963">here</a>), but he cites the
concrete example of Östen Dahl's work on tense-aspect categories.
What was innovative about is was that it was based on a parallel
questionnaire and other parallel texts, and Dahl found "gram
clusters" such as "perfect grams", "imperfective grams", "habitual
grams".<br>
<br>
According to Dahl (2016: 435), we can see these as similar to Boyd's
(1999) homeostatic property clusters (HPC):<br>
<br>
<div data-offset-key="5l440-0-0" class="_1mf _1mj"><font size="-1"><span><span
data-offset-key="5l440-0-0"><span data-text="true">"According</span></span></span></font><span
data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span data-text="true"><font
size="-1"> to HPC theory, a natural kind is a group of
entities with stable similarities, where there may however
be no properties shared by all and only the members of the
group. The only condition is that the similarities are
stable enough to make better than chance predictions and
that there are maintained by “homeostatic causal
mechanisms”. In the case of biological species, these
mechanisms are inheritance of shared genetic material and
environmental pressures."</font><br>
<br>
So this is presented by Spike (2020) as an alternative to the
tripartition between descriptive (p-)categories, comparative
(g-)concepts, and innate natural-kind categories. <br>
<br>
However:<br>
<br>
(i) Dahl and Spike do not really suggest that such "clusters"
can serve as language-particular descriptive categories (the
English Perfect still needs to be distinguished from the
Spanish Perfect, because they don't have exactly the same
conditions of use)<br>
<br>
(ii) HPC theory does not help us understand how generative
grammar operates (the main reason I introduced the notion of a
"natural-kinds programme" was that I wanted to explain why
generative linguists are doing what they are doing; e.g. here:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1012">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1012</a>)<br>
<br>
(iii) Even though the Dahlian tense-aspect clusters are of
course extremely interesting typological generalizations, we
do not understand their "homeostatic causal mechanisms" well.<br>
<br>
(iv) Clearly, in order to arrive at </span></span><span
data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span data-text="true">Dahlian
clusters, one needs comparative concepts of the token-based
type, e.g. questionnaire translations, or parallel texts.
There is no counterpart to this in biological HPCs – the
"similarities" are not defined in the same (semi-arbitrary)
way as in linguistics.<br>
<br>
(v) Spike argues that</span></span><span
data-offset-key="98muu-0-0"><span data-text="true"> “</span></span><span><span
data-offset-key="98muu-1-0"><span data-text="true">The</span></span></span><span
data-offset-key="98muu-2-0"><span data-text="true"> utility of
some kind does not require clear-cut, exceptionless
definitions, but rather a track record of being used in
successful inferences... Agronomists can tell you what to
plant, geologists have a good idea of where to look for
oil...” </span></span><span data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span
data-text="true"></span></span><span
data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span data-text="true"></span></span><span
data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span data-text="true"><br>
<br>
But while agronomists and geologists have had successes which
are evident from usesful applications, the same can hardly be
said about theoretical linguistics. So we don't have an
independent way of assessing how successful or concepts are.<br>
<br>
So while Spike (2020) made some interesting contributions
(just like Round & Corbett 2020, on which see
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2415">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2415</a>), there's no reason to think
that there is a problem with the usual way of <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://benjamins.com/catalog/alal.20032.has">dealing
with uniqueness</a> – but on the other hand, I also wish
Erich a lot of success with his attempts at having his cookies
and eat them too :-) Maybe it will eventually turn out that
both (or all three) approaches are right, but for different
domains.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
References<br>
<br>
</span></span>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:1.0cm;text-indent:-1.0cm"><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Boyd,
Richard. 1999. Homeostasis, species, and higher taxa. In
Wilson, R. (ed.), <i>Species:
New interdisciplinary essays</i>. Cambridge MA: MIT Pres.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:1.0cm;text-indent:-1.0cm"><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Dahl, Östen.
2016. Thoughts on language-specific and crosslinguistic
entities. <i>Linguistic
Typology</i> 20(2). 427–437. (doi:</span><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman""><a
href="https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2016-0016"><span
style="color:blue;mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">10.1515/lingty-2016-0016</span></a></span><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:1.0cm;text-indent:-1.0cm"><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Round, Erich
R. & Corbett, Greville G. 2020. Comparability and
measurement in
typological science: The bright future for linguistics. <i>Linguistic
Typology</i>.
De Gruyter Mouton 24(3). 489–525. (doi:</span><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman""><a
href="https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-2060"><span
style="color:blue;mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">10.1515/lingty-2020-2060</span></a></span><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:1.0cm;text-indent:-1.0cm"><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Spike,
Matthew. 2020. Fifty shades of grue: Indeterminate categories
and induction in
and out of the language sciences. </span><i><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New
Roman"">Linguistic
Typology</span></i><span
style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">. De
Gruyter Mouton 24(3). 465–488.
(doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-2061"><span
style="color:
blue">10.1515/lingty-2020-2061</span></a>)</span></p>
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<span data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span data-text="true"></span></span><span
data-offset-key="5l440-1-0"><span data-text="true"> </span></span></div>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.shh.mpg.de/employees/42385/25522">https://www.shh.mpg.de/employees/42385/25522</a></pre>
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