[Corpora-List] Typological problems and corpora

[Jim Fidelholtz]

Hi, Yuri,

I'm a general, generativist linguist with little real work in typology as
such, but interested in the area. It does seem to me that typological
studies have a less questionable future than its past, given fairly recent
works like Labov, Haspelmath et al. (I'm probably conflating here more than
one work, which could even be Al. et H. & L. or some other subset, which I
could run downstairs and check, since I have at least one of these works,
but you know what I'm referring to) with ever larger numbers of languages in
their data.

In typology, we need to consider the fairly large variety of language types,
even within the same language family like Indo-European; the moderately
large number of creoles, pidgins, 'mixed languages' and their descendents,
which arguably (could or do) have distinct sorts of structures (at least in
some aspects) from other sorts of languages; the debatable influence of
borrowings on language structure in general and its debatable relative
influence in historical development; and (not least, in my estimation) the
fact that *every* known language contains at least some interjections with
some segments and sequences which are impermissible in the 'normal'
phonology of the language (just in English: oink [oyŋk], various 'clicks'
{tsk, tsk etc.}; the 'raspberry' {a voiceless bilabiolingual trill, which,
as far as I know, occurs in the phonology of *no* language}) and thus cause
problems in theory and practice with respect to their integration into
linguistic descriptions {this last aspect, to my knowledge, is only taken
into consideration, up until recently and in 'Western' linguistics, in the
Russian and Grecoroman linguistic traditions}. Given all this, and even
though it is a welcome development to have the recent spate of publications
mentioned above with often close to 1000 different languages and efforts to
include representatives from as many distinct families as possible and
efferts to include languages which are typologically odd in different ways,
we need to have further efforts at the inclusion of *all* languages which
are in any way typologically odd (and good luck to all of us on this point
-- obviously this is not a criticism of the very inclusive works already
mentioned or of others with smaller aspirations which of course are also
useful in this sort of endeavor).

At the present stage of typological work, we cannot turn up our noses at any
reasonably careful study, I don't think. And, although I have indicated the
necessity of having in our databases in principle representatives of *all*
typologically distinct types for *all* classes of linguistic phenomena, this
clearly cannot be realized at present. In this sense (and in fact even if we
could realize this 'ideal' of having in effect representatives of all
languages and dialects in the database), none of these ruminations should be
taken as arguments against having statistical studies and conclusions within
typological studies. All of the above, however, *is* an argument against
eliminating the data from such languages completely from such studies. The
history of science in general clearly illustrates this methodological fact
-- just within linguistics, compare Verner's 'adjustment' of Grimm's 'Law',
etc.

I hope these reflections from a partially-informed non-typologist can be of
some use to people working mainly in typology, including many members of
this list. For me, the bottom line here is the necessity in typological work
for good descriptive linguistic studies of *all* languages, since my
experience indicates that virtually every language has some aspects of
typological interest. For linguists on this list working on *any* language
(even English): this means you!

Jim


On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 12:06 PM, Yuri Tambovtsev <yutamb at mail.ru> wrote:

Dear Corpora colleagues, I wonder if we use the notion of typology in
building different corpora. I certainly use typological methods constructing
my phonetic corpora. However, reading journals on typology I came to a
conclusion that different linguists and edotors understand typology in their
own way. It especially concerns editors who may return a manuscript on the
pretext that it is not on typology. Therefore, it occurred to me to discuss
the term "typology" in order to realise how it is understood in modern
linguistics. Looking forward to receiving your definitions to *
yutamb at mail.ru* <yutamb at mail.ru> Yours sincerely Yuri Tambovtsev
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-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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