juxtaposition: description vs. classification

[Martin Haspelmath]

Thanks, Wolfgang, for this interesting post. I agree with almost 
everything you said (about the gestalt-like nature of linguistic form, 
and the inseparability of segmental and nonsegmental marking) with 
regard to language description, but remember that we have been talking 
about typological classification, not description.

I have been arguing that typological classification and description are 
two very different enterprises, and that their confusion has often led 
to problems in typology. (It's worst in generative linguistics, where 
descriptive categories are universally assumed to be the same as the 
categories needed for typological classification.)

Typological classification inevitably involves "reductions", 
"isolations", and "depriving of gestalt properties". Languages differ 
enormously from each other, and there is no way we could classify them 
in a way that leaves their gestalt properties intact. And vice versa, 
there is no way we could describe languages by just listing their 
settings for a range of typological parameters.

For this reason, hard-core structuralists have tended to be skeptical of 
typology, but since Greenberg's obviously significant work, the skeptics 
have mostly become silent. But why was Greenberg successful? I would 
argue that it was because he was bold enough to make "reductions" and 
"isolations", and despite all this, he still found lots of fascinating 
correlations. (See my paper "Comparative concepts vs. descriptive 
categories in cross-linguistic studies, 
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/papers.html.)

So I would not be surprised if one could find correlations even if one 
classified Västerbotten Swedish with Papuan Malay only on the basis of 
their lack of segmental marking, along the lines of Andrew Spencer's & 
Irina Nikolaeva's original query.

Best wishes,
Martin

Wolfgang Schulze wrote:
> linguistic expressions are 'gestalts', and cutting off segments from 
> these gestalts always conditions a loss of information (properties of 
> the gestalt). For instance, a feather always is a feather of a special 
> kind of bird. If we reduce our analysis to the properties of the 
> feather itself without referring to the whole gestalt of the bird and 
> the interaction of (say) feather and wing dynamics, we probably cannot 
> describe (and explain!) the properties of the feather coherently. In 
> other words: Segmental marking is a 'part of the whole' and isolating 
> it from the whole means to deprive it from its 'gestalting' 
> properties. The fact that we have not (yet) available 'Papuan apples' 
> should motivate us to be cautious with respect to the segmental 
> features (Papuan oranges) we are confronted with and to describe their 
> functional values (derived from segmental analysis) with a marked 
> '*caveat*' in our heads....
> Best wishes,
> Wolfgang      
>
> Martin Haspelmath schrieb:
>> I agree with Claude that prosody can be compared across languages, 
>> and that typologists working on syntax should make more and more use 
>> of phonetic information. But I would not say that gathering 
>> information in a phonetics lab is "easy".
>>
>> Easy typology consists in work that is based on reference grammars, 
>> and all large-scale typological work so far has been of the "easy" 
>> kind, for reasons of limited funding.
>>
>> What I'm worried about is the tendency to say that well-studied 
>> languages (like, say, Swedish) are different from poorly studied 
>> languages (like, say, Papuan Malay) because we happen to know that 
>> Swedish has a particular prosodic property, while we know virtually 
>> nothing about the prosody of Papuan Malay.
>>
>> Limiting ourselves to segmental information at least makes sure that 
>> we are not comparing (Swedish) apples with (Papuan) oranges, because 
>> we know enough about segmental marking in both languages and how to 
>> compare it.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
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