excessive criticism

[David Gil]

Joan,

You write:
> I think that the criticism of Prof Leiss is excessive.  It verges on
> pillorying.  Wasn't she merely observing what typologists know to be
> true: that the grammars of languages which lack the familiar
> structures and markers found in English, for example, often have
> unfamiliar but functionally equivalent means in their own grammars?
>   
There is a significant and growing literature in typology (see for 
example several of the papers in Sampson, Gil and Trudgill 2009, and 
references therein) that questions the assumption that "the grammars of 
languages which lack the familiar structures and markers found in 
English, for example, often have unfamiliar but functionally equivalent 
means in their own grammars"; it's certainly not the case that this is 
something that "typologists know to be true".  Whether or not it is 
actually true is something that can and should be settled empirically, 
by investigations such as those of Dan Everett and many of his 
colleagues.  It cannot be settled if we are told that we're not supposed 
to even ask the relevant questions.

REFERENCE
Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil and Peter Trudgill (2009) Language 
Complexity as an Evolving Variable, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

David

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/