[Lingtyp] Semitic numeral agreement

Wed Feb 3 16:47:27 UTC 2016

Semitic cardinal numerals 1 and 2 agree in gender with the nouns they count. Numerals 3-10 (Hebrew) or 3-19 (Akkadian) use the opposite gender from the noun they count. Huehnergard and Woods (2008) do not offer an explanation for this pattern and Kelley (1992:97) says there is no satisfactory explanation for it in ancient Hebrew. 

Can anyone tell me if this phenomenon is unique to Semitic, or are there languages in other families that exhibit a similar switch in pattern for numerals 3 and higher?

Thanks, 

Les Bruce

From: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] On Behalf Of Martin Haspelmath
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2016 3:31 AM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

I think we really agree in all major respects here:

– yes, descriptive work has gotten better by integrating typological perspectives (so description and typology should continue to exist in symbiosis)

– no, one shouldn't use ("structuralist") language-specific categories for typological comparison (as the generativists often try to do)

– yes, every typological variable "captures" something of interest in a language, even if it is only a tiny bit of some category

We probably also agree that language description *needs* to make use of language-specific categories, because without them, the description would be very unparsimonious in many places and thus impractical (for example, to describe German, we need categories such as "Neuter gender" and "Weak verb"; otherwise, the description would get hopelessly convoluted).

(It seems that this is was at the heart of Randy LaPolla's objection to using "subject" or "A" in classifying Chinese word order; he seemed to think that word order statements need to be based on the descriptively indispensable language-specific categories, even when they are meant only for typological purposes.)

But note that I use "comparative concept" in a broader sense than "typological variable". Every typological variable is a comparative concept (by definition), but some comparative concepts (e.g. "ergative case", or "clause", or "high vowel") are not variables by themselves – they are crucial ingredients of variables.

Best,
Martin

On 01.02.16 08:59, Balthasar Bickel wrote:

I have just now had a chance to read up on this very interesting discussion and noticed a certain trend towards keeping comparative work outside the description of individual languages. I find this problematic. Modern descriptive work has become better precisely by integrating typological perspectives, and I have always found that I have started to understand a phenomenon in a language only once I could tell with some precision how it compares to similar phenomena in other languages.

It might help to realize that “comparative concepts” --- or typological variables, as I prefer to call them --- contrast with language-specific categories in two very different ways. Only one of these contrasts is a contrast between research enterprises.

(i) By definition, the categories of a typological variable can recur across languages, language-specific categories can’t. For example, ‘argument with most agent properties in Dowty’s definition’, ‘linearly ordered before’, a Nijmegen-style exlicitation simulus, a Dahl TAM questionnaire context, a translation context etc. can all by definition recur across languages, the Saussurian sign -ed ‘PST’ can’t.

(ii) Language-specific categories serve a purpose in a Pāṇini-inspired, structuralist analysis where the goal is to re-use categories in a maximally parsimonous way (so you can say, e.g., there is a category of ‘subordinate clauses’ in language X, defined by a set of properties in X, and then find that the same category also captures --- or even ‘causes’ --- the constraints on WH questions in X). By contrast, typological variables don’t serve such a purpose. If you want to explore patterns across variables or even capture the system as a whole, you use stats (and so you might discover for example that certain values on a variable that captures WH possibilities correlate to some extent with certain values on a variable that captures the scope behavior of illocutionary force markers, a correlation caused by information structure principles; Bickel 2010).

The contrast in (i) merely limits the range of things you can compare typologically (as opposed to reconstruct proto-individuals), but it doesn’t imply anything about the usefulness of typological variables for describing languages, let alone call for a terminological distinction between ‘matching’ vs ‘instantiating’ a category or for different research enterprises. Every well-defined typological variable captures or measures something of interest in a language --- but obviously it is only ‘something’, a very tiny aspect of a very complex phenomenon: “is used for past time event” clearly only captures a tiny bit of, say, the English PST marker, but it does capture something real.  In fact,  a typologial variable might pick up something that is indeed very real because it directly corresponds to electrophysiologically detectable patterns (see e.g. Bickel et al. 2015 in PloS ONE <http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132819>  on the S=A vs S≠A variable).  (And, yes, saying that Chinese is SVO captures something real in Chinese, but I agree with others that the traditional terms and abbreviations here are misleading.)

The contrast in (ii) is where we get a real opposition between different approaches for analyzing languages, perhaps even sub-disciplines. Given the complexity of language, though, it won’t harm to use both approaches simultaneously. Where things get tricky and confusing is if you want to design typological variables not in the sense of (i) but for comparing the language-specific categories in the sense of (ii). I wouldn’t.

Balthasar Bickel.