Concerning WALS

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear Esa,

Thanks a lot for writing this detailed commentary on the World Atlas of 
Language Structures (WALS). This is the most detailed review that has 
been written, and we are very grateful for it. Many of the individual 
points of criticism are well-taken, and the WALS authors should take 
them into account in future editions. (We're planning future online 
editions of WALS, see the free online version at http://wals.info.)

Just one comment, concerning one of your major points:

You write (p. 1): "The reader of WALS is encouraged ... to seek 
*correlations* between the results of different chapters, and this 
clearly presupposes a high degree of compatibility between the views of 
different authors."

Well, I would say: To find true correlations, the chapters must be 
sufficiently correct, but they don't necessarily have to be very 
compatible, certainly not in terminology. Suppose you want to link 
case-marking and plural marking, and ask whether affixal case-marking 
(as opposed to adpositional marking) correlates with affixal plural 
marking (as opposed to pluralization by number words). Then even if the 
two chapters use different definitions of "affixal", you might still get 
a true correlation. But it will of course be a correlation between 
affixal(1) case-marking and affixal(2) pluralization, not between 
"affixal (tout court) case-marking and pluralization".

My view is that typological definitions are inherently 
linguist-specific, and as such the typological concepts of different 
linguists are bound to be different (unless a Chomsky-like figure comes 
along and imposes widespread "agreement by authority"). So care has to 
be taken in interpreting WALS correlations, of course. But this is not a 
flaw in the design of the project.

Typology cannot be based on some kind of "definitive" set of grammatical 
concepts, because there is no such list (or if there is, i.e. if UG 
exists after all, we're so far away from knowing what it is that it's 
irrelevant for practical purposes). Each language has its own 
categories, so typologists necessarily have to make up their comparative 
concepts that give them the most interesting results.

(For more on this, see my paper "Comparative concepts and descriptive 
categories in cross-linguistic studies", on my website under "Papers and 
handouts".)

Martin Haspelmath

Esa Itkonen wrote:
> Dear Funknetters: By all accounts, World Atlas of Language Structures (= WALS) is a monumental achievement. Still, two intrepid Finnish linguists (= myself & Anneli Pajunen) have ventured to write a 30-page commentary on it, available 
> on the homepage below. Enjoy!
>
> Esa Itkonen
>
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>   

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/index.html
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, 
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D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616