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<font face="Liberation Serif, serif">Thanks for this discussion.
Some
discussants emphasize that the data linguists are faced with
display
variation and arbitrariness at all 'lectal' levels while others
insist on the search for underlying principles that reduce the
freedom. One might say that that is a moot ideological dispute
because both parties have a point. It seems clear that the
proponents
of systematicity can hope to advance our knowledge of language
only
if the principles (rules, laws) that they establish take the
existent
variation into account. It should be equally clear that the
search
for systematicity in the object area is precisely the task of
empirical science. The unbiased representation of the data and
the
orderly description of their distribution is a presupposition,
but it
is not the goal of science. The goal is to reduce this
description to
the most simple and general form possible.</font></p>
<p lang="en-US" class="western"
style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif">This brings me back to the
dispute - which has popped up on this list more than once - over
the
role of comparative concepts. They are necessary in typology.
Typological assessments and generalizations are couched in terms
of
comparative concepts like 'seven-vowel system vs. five-vowel
system'.
To say that such concepts have no 'lect-independent' status is
dodging the issue. Concepts such as [<font color="#212121">ɪ]
and
[e]</font> have a general, language independent status.
Otherwise
what generations of typologists have said about them would be
gibberish. And of course, they are not defined in terms of
acoustic
features. They are defined by combining a prototype (as Daniel
Jones
once did for vowels) with what E. Keenan once called 'behavioral
properties' like being able to make a contrast in minimal pairs,
getting neutralized together with a neighboring phone in certain
contexts and so forth. The same goes, needless to say, for
concepts
at other levels of the language system like 'passive' and
'antipassive', 'ergative vs. accusative structure',
'agglutinative
vs. isolating morphology' (this is just being used in the
simultaneous discussion on glossing) and so forth.</font></p>
<p lang="en-US" class="western"
style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif">And such concepts are
relative
in the sense that they are not put up in isolation but in the
context
of a system of other concepts. Thus, the definition of an [<font
color="#212121">ɪ]
is accompanied by a definition of [e], the definition of a
passive
construction goes together with (at least) the definition of
an
active construction, and so forth. The simultaneous definition
of
neighboring concepts renders it possible to apply them despite
their
prototypical nature.</font></font></p>
<p lang="en-US" class="western"
style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif"><font color="#212121">Such
definitions regulate the use of comparative concepts in
language
description and comparison. They regulate whether a particular
phone
in a language will be called [ɪ] or rather [e]. If one took an
agnostic position concerning the validity of one rather than
another
concept in the categorization of a given phenomenon, one would
render
typological work and, ultimately, generalizations about human
language impossible. That is, one would deny linguistics the
status
of a science.</font></font></p>
<p lang="en-US" class="western"
style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif"><font color="#212121">We are
not
talking about whether linguistics is a science in the same
sense as
chemistry is. Nor are we talking about whether all those
comparative
concepts that linguists have been using over the past two
centuries
have been defined well or always been used responsibly. We are
talking about the necessity and possibility of defining and
using
comparative concepts in linguistic work.</font></font></p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span></p>
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<td>Tel.:</td>
<td>+49/361/2113417</td>
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<td>E-Post:</td>
<td><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:christianw_lehmann@arcor.de">christianw_lehmann@arcor.de</a></td>
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<td>Web:</td>
<td><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.christianlehmann.eu">https://www.christianlehmann.eu</a></td>
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