[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

Wed Jan 20 04:24:19 UTC 2016

(Might I just add as a sidenote that this discussion is very interesting,
and that what Dryer puts forward here is very much what I was taught in my
typological undergrad program in Stockholm and practice.

All emails on this mailing list are stored in a public archive that anyone
can access, and I'd like to recommend fellow junior diversity
linguists/typologists to read this thread.

For other fellow junior researchers I wrote up some advice on where to turn
when terminologically confused that deals with some of the issues raised
here. Perhaps your students would also find it useful:
http://humans-who-read-grammars.blogspot.com.au/p/help-linguistics-is-hard.html

Also, I once made up a word that might fit in here, "typologese" - it's
when you get language specific descriptions very influenced by certain
typological works and categories so that you start to doubt their
bottom-upness and worry that just like translation grammars from french
they are translation grammars from "typologese". )

/Hedvig

*Hedvig Skirgård*
PhD Candidate
The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

School of Culture, History and Language
College of Asia and the Pacific

Rm 4203, H.C. Coombs Building (#9)
The Australian National University

Acton ACT 2601

Australia

Co-char of Public Relations

International Olympiad of Linguistics

www.ioling.org

On 20 January 2016 at 14:35, Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu> wrote:

> Randy,
>
>
>
> I am more than willing to adopt the rhetorical stance that if I think I
> disagree with you, the default is that it is that I am misunderstanding
> what you are saying. As a rhetorical move, I will argue why I think you are
> mistaken when you say something, not to prove you are wrong, but to provide
> you with the opportunity to clarify what you mean.
>
>
>
> However, I suspect that we are in broad agreement about what is the right
> thing to do at the level of describing individual languages. To me,
> describing or analysing a particular language is a completely different
> enterprise from classifying the language typologically, except that the
> former is a necessary prerequisite for the latter. The former should be
> describing the language entirely in its own terms, rather than trying to
> fit it into some typology. I am also strongly opposed to
> questionnaire-based typology, since if one is classifying phenomenon X in a
> set of languages, one needs to see how phenomenon X in a given language
> fits into the overall grammatical system of the language. I suspect we are
> broad agreement on those issues.
>
>
>
> Second, since the number of possible types is presumably infinite,
> typology necessarily lumps together languages which are some level are
> clearly different. Even if I lump together types of languages which differ
> in some crucial way in their grammatical system, I feel obligated to
> justify grouping them together. That is the basis for my grouping together
> languages in which there is a grammatical rule that defines the language as
> what I would call SVO and languages where there are no syntactic rules
> governing clause word order, but where the pragmatic factors governing word
> order and the frequency in discourse in which those different pragmatic
> factors arise result in more frequent SVO order at the level of frequency
> in usage.
>
>
>
> Third, it is important to distinguish terminological “disagreements”
> (which are not really disagreements) from substantive disagreements. Part
> of the difference in our discussion is based on our using the terms
> “subject” and “object” differently. I use it these terms as they are used
> in the vast majority of grammatical descriptions produced in the past 100
> years, one which is roughly equivalent to the A and P in “basic”
> constructions (like active as opposed to passive). I recognize, however,
> that there are many linguists who use these terms differently.
>
>
>
> When you say “Simply lumping them together under a single rubric does
> nothing but categorise them, and doesn’t explain anything”, the first part
> is not really true, on my view, if the basis for lumping them together is
> that they behave the same with respect to some explanatory enterprise. I.e.
> lumping them together is a necessary step towards explanation. You are right
> that lumping them together explains nothing. But NOT lumping together in
> the case we are discussing only leads, in my view, to mistaken
> explanations, since if we restricted our attention to languages in which
> the VO order reflected a syntactic rule in the language, we might be lead
> to explanations in terms of grammatical rules of the sort that are popular
> in some versions of generative grammar. The fact that languages which are
> VO in my terms only due to frequency in usage tend to exhibit the word
> order characteristics associated with VO word order means that we can rule
> out those lines of explanation that depend crucially on syntactic rules.
>
>
> Matthew
>
> On 1/19/16 9:44 AM, Randy John LaPolla (Prof) wrote:
>
> Sorry, Matthew, no. I am arguing it is an empirical question, and am
> against the a priori assumption and imposition of categories on languages
> without any basis. This is what I have been fighting against for almost 30
> years.
>
> We seem to be talking past each other, as we each have our own way of
> understanding things, and assume the others are saying something they
> aren’t.  It seems impossible to post to this list without being
> misunderstood.  This is nice evidence for the theory of communication
> I’ve been flogging for 20 years, but it is very frustrating.
>
> I was talking about the inductive analysis of individual languages. You
> are talking about cross-linguistic characterisations. I also argue there
> are no universal categories, and I think we need to understand each
> language on its own terms, and in a description of an individual language,
> which is what I am talking about, you need to give the facts of that
> language, not a cross-linguistic category that also happens to have the
> same name as a category that many people ascribe to individual languages,
> such that people reading that description will assume the language has that
> category.
>
> Also, what does the category “subject” mean to you such that it would be
> cross-linguistically useful, to the point of even saying languages that
> don’t have such a category are subject-verb-object languages?
>
> In terms of the correlations you talk about among languages that manifest
> what is (from my view problematically) subsumed under the VO or SVO rubric,
> my view is that we should look for the reasons why, in terms of information
> structure, structural pivots, historical development, or whatever, the
> languages manifest the particular patterns they do. Simply lumping them
> together under a single rubric does nothing but categorise them, and
> doesn’t explain anything.
>
> Randy
>
>
> On 19 Jan 2016, at 9:01 pm, Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu> wrote:
>
> My point is actually independent of the question of whether there are
> crosslinguistic categories.  Even if there are/were crosslinguistic
> categories, it doesn’t follow that typological classification is based on
> those categories. My statement that “classifying languages typologically
> does not entail that the terms employed in the typological classification
> correspond to categories in the language” is consistent with a position
> that classifying languages typologically sometimes classifies them on the
> basis of crosslinguistic categories and sometimes on the basis of
> semantically-defined notions or other notions independent of
> crosslinguistic categories. Randy’s statement that classifying a language
> as SVO implies that the language has categories of subject and object seems
> to imply that typological classification MUST be based on categories that
> exist within the individual languages.
>
>
>
> But there is a good argument that in the case in question, any typological
> classification that was based on categories that exist in individual
> languages and on languages in which word order codes subject and object
> would be inadequate. As I argued in Dryer (1989), languages in which word
> order does not code grammatical relations and in which the word order is
> not based on grammatical relations but in which VO word order is more
> common tend to have word order properties associated with VO word order,
> like prepositions, while analogous languages in which OV word order is more
> common tend to have word order properties associated with OV word order,
> like postpositions. What this means is that the GRAMMARS of what I classify
> as VO languages have nothing in common. It is only the languages that have
> something in common at the level of usage. Hence any notion of SVO language
> restricted to languages in which there are subject and object categories
> and in which word order is determined by grammatical relations will
> necessarily fail as the basis of word order correlations.
>
>
>
> The problem with Randy’s position (and perhaps Jan’s) is that he is making
> an a priori assumption on what is actually an empirical question.
>
>
> Matthew
>
> On 1/18/16 11:12 PM, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, to many people (not only generativists) it isn't obvious at
> all that "classifying languages typologically does not entail that the
> terms employed in the typological classification correspond to categories
> in the language" (in other words, that comparative concepts are distinct
> from descriptive categories).
>
> It seems that the default assumption of many people when they hear a term
> like "dative" or "clitic" is that they are concepts like "copper" or "red
> fox", i.e. natural kinds that exist independently of individual language
> systems, just as red foxes can be recognized independently of their
> habitats, and copper can even be recognized independently of the planet on
> which is occurs. This is false, but it hasn't been very widely recognized.
>
> In the 1980s, typologists discovered the important differences between
> agents, topics, and syntactic pivots (as noted by Randy), but such more
> fine-grained categories are still not sufficient for describing any
> language. Agents can be different across languages, topics can be
> different, and syntactic pivots can be different. Thus, even "agent",
> "topic" and "pivot" can only be used as comparative concepts, not as
> universally applicable descriptive categories that would somehow have the
> same meaning in different languages.
>
> Thus, it is not just confusing terminology (like Y.R. Chao's "subject"),
> but also the presupposition that categories can be carried over from one
> language to another that has confused linguists.
>
> Martin
>
> On 19.01.16 07:52, Matthew Dryer wrote:
>
> Randy says that calling Chinese SVO implies that Chinese has such
> categories. I am surprised that he would say that. I would have thought it
> was obvious that classifying languages typologically does not entail that
> the terms employed in the typological classification correspond to
> categories in the language. Nor does it mean that these categories
> determine or are determined by word order. I have certainly made that clear
> in my work that classifying a language as SVO makes no claim about the
> categories in the language, nor that these categories determine word order
> even if the language has such categories.
>
> Matthew
>
> On 1/18/16 7:42 PM, Randy John LaPolla (Prof) wrote:
>
> Dan’s point is very important. For example, most people describing
> languages do not know how to distinguish agents, topics, and syntactic
> pivots (“subject”), and just call anything that occurs initially as
> “subject”. Sometimes even when the linguist is clear on the difference,
> they still use the word “subject”. E.g. Y. R. Chao, in his grammar of
> spoken Chinese, clearly stated there is nothing like what is referred to as
> “subject” in English, as all clauses are simply topic-comment, but he still
> used the term “subject” for what he said was purely a topic. This has
> confused generations of linguists, and they call Chinese SVO, which not
> only implies that Chinese has such categories, but also that these
> categories either determine or are determined by word order. See the
> following paper arguing against the use of such shortcuts, and arguing for
> more careful determination of the factors determining word order in a
> language:
>
> LaPolla, Randy J. & Dory Poa. 2006. On describing word order. *Catching
> Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing, *ed. by Felix Ameka,
> Alan Dench, & Nicholas Evans, 269-295. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
>
>
> <http://randylapolla.net/papers/LaPolla_and_Poa_2006_On_Describing_Word_Order.pdf>
> <http://randylapolla.net/papers/LaPolla_and_Poa_2006_On_Describing_Word_Order.pdf>
> http://randylapolla.net/papers/LaPolla_and_Poa_2006_On_Describing_Word_Order.pdf
>
> Randy
> -----
> *Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA* （羅仁 地）| Division of Linguistics and
> Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
> HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825
> GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | <http://randylapolla.net/>
> <http://randylapolla.net/>http://randylapolla.net/
>
>
>
> On 19 Jan 2016, at 10:21 am, Everett, Daniel < <DEVERETT at bentley.edu>
> DEVERETT at bentley.edu> wrote:
>
> One of the biggest problems in this regard that I have noticed is in
> grammars of individual languages. Fieldworkers sometimes confuse semantic
> and formal categories in the grammars, classifying as a syntactic structure
> a semantic category. If typologists are not careful writers/readers of
> grammars they may bring such confusions into their typological studies.
> Sounds obvious. But not always so.
>
> Dan
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jan 18, 2016, at 21:11, Matthew Dryer < <dryer at buffalo.edu>
> dryer at buffalo.edu> wrote:
>
> I agree entirely with Jan on the need to distinguish semantic categories
> and formal categories. In fact, in a paper of mine that is I have nearly
> completed revising, I have an entire section arguing that generative
> approaches fail to note the fact that a given semantic category often has
> many different formal expressions over different languages and that this is
> problematic for implicit assumptions that equate semantic categories with
> formal categories.
>
>
> But Jan seems to think that this presents some sort of problem for the
> work I have done in word order typology.  He says “When these authors
> subsequently formulate rules and principles on the basis of the data they
> collected, the semantic category labels (Adjective, Genitive, Relative
> Clause, but also e.g. Demonstrative and Numeral) appear to stand for
> *formal* categories, i.e. categories whose members are defined on the
> basis of structural or morphosyntactic criteria”. But this is false. They
> stand for semantic categories.
>
>
> Jan seems to think that it is somehow a problem that a given semantic
> category may have many different formal realizations across different
> languages. However, neither in his email nor in his 2009 paper in LT does
> he explain why he sees this as a problem.
>
>
> There is, I admit, a *potential* problem.  Namely, it might be the case
> that for the purposes of word order correlations, the syntactic realization
> of a semantic category makes a major difference and that lumping the
> different syntactic realizations together is obscuring these differences.
> That is why I have spent considerable time over the years collecting data,
> not only on word order in particular languages, but also on the syntactic
> realization in these languages, precisely to examine empirically whether
> the syntactic realization makes a difference. The result is that while the
> syntactic realization sometimes makes a small difference, it is overall
> irrelevant: by and large, generalizations over semantic categories apply
> the same, regardless of the syntactic realization.
>
> Matthew
>
> On 1/18/16 4:41 AM, Jan Rijkhoff wrote:
>
> I think the last word has not been said about Greenbergian word order
> correlations, mainly because semantic categories and formal categories have
> not always been clearly distinguished in post-Greenberg (1963) word order
> studies (Rijkhoff 2009a).* For example, both Hawkins (1983: 12) and Dryer
> (1992: 120) claimed that they followed Greenberg (1963: 74) in ‘basically
> applying semantic criteria’ to identify members of the same category across
> languages, but in practice these semantically defined forms and
> constructions are treated as formal entities.
>
>
> If Hawkins and Dryer applied semantic criteria in their cross-linguistic
> studies, this implies, for example, that their semantic category Adjective
> must also have included verbal and nominal expressions of adjectival
> notions (such as relative clauses and genitives), which are typically used
> in languages that lack a dedicated class of adjectives:
>
>
> *Kiribati *(Ross 1998: 90)
>
> (1) *te      uee      ae    e          tikiraoi*         (relative clause)
>
>      art  flower  rel  3sg.s   be.pretty
>
>      ‘a pretty flower’ (lit. ‘a flower that pretties’)
>
>
> *Makwe* (Devos 2008: 136)
>
> (2)*   muú-nu      w-á=ki-búúli*                 (genitive)
>
>      nc1-person  pp1-gen=nc7-silence
>
>     ‘a silent person’ (lit. ‘person of silence’)
>
>
> Relative Clause and Genitive are, however, also semantic categories in
> their own right in word order studies by Dryer and Hawkins.
>
>
> When these authors subsequently formulate rules and principles on the
> basis of the data they collected, the semantic category labels (Adjective,
> Genitive, Relative Clause, but also e.g. Demonstrative and Numeral) appear
> to stand for *formal* categories, i.e. categories whose members are
> defined on the basis of structural or morphosyntactic criteria. This
> apparent change of category is not explained, but can be seen in the case
> of the ‘Heaviness Serialization Principle’ (Hawkins 1983: 90-91) and the
> ‘Branching Direction Theory’ (Dryer 1992).
>
>
> Hawkins defined ‘heaviness’ in terms of such non-semantic criteria as
> (a) length and quantity of morphemes, (b) quantity of words, (c) syntactic
> depth of branching nodes, and (d) inclusion of dominated constituents.
>
>
> (3)   *Heaviness Serialization Principle*: Rel  ≥R  Gen  ≥R  A  ≥R
> Dem/Num
>
>
> Thus a member of the (semantic? formal?) category Relative Clause is
> ‘heavier’ than a member of the (semantic? formal?) category Adjective. But
> Hawkins’s semantic category Adjective must also have included members of
> the ‘heavy’ formal categories Genitive and Relative Clause (see (1) and (2)
> above). It is not clear whether the original members of the single semantic
> category Adjective were later ‘re-categorized’ and distributed over the
> formal categories Adjective, Genitive and Relative Clause in the *Heaviness
> Serialization Principle*.
>
>
> Dryer’s ‘Branching Direction Theory’ refers to a structural feature of the
> internal syntactic organization of a constituent. According to the
> ‘Branching Direction Theory’, relative clauses and genitives are phrases,
> i.e. members of a branching category, whose position relative to the noun
> correlates with the relative order of Verb and Object, whereas adjectives
> are non-branching elements, whose position relative to the noun does not
> correlate with OV or VO order (Dryer 1992: 107-8, 110-1). In this case,
> too, one may assume that the semantic category Adjective also included
> members of the formal categories Genitive and Relative Clause (see examples
> above). Again we do not know what happened to the branching/phrasal members
> of the erstwhile(?) semantic category Adjective (relative clauses,
> genitives) when this category was turned into the formal (non-branching)
> category Adjective that is part of the ‘Branching Direction Theory’.
>
>
> So as to avoid categorial confusion in cross-linguistic research (and so
> as to make it possible to produce more reliable results), it is necessary
> to keep formal and semantic categories apart, as members of these two
> categories have their own ordering rules or preferences. I also think it is
> an illusion to think we can give a satisfactory account of the grammatical
> behaviour of linguistic units -including word order- without taking into
> consideration functional (interpersonal) categories or ‘discourse units’
> (Rijkhoff 2009b, 2015).
>
>
> * Greenberg (1963: 88) made it clear that he sometimes used formal
> criteria to remove certain members of a semantic category before he
> formulated a universal, as in the case of his Universal 22.
>
>
> *References*
>
> Devos, M. 2008. * A Grammar of Makwe*. München: Lincom Europa.
>
> Dryer, M. S., 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. *Language*
> 68-1, 81-138.
>
> Greenberg, J. H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular
> reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. H. Greenberg (ed.), *Universals
> of Language*, 73-113. Cambridge MA: MIT.
>
> Hawkins, J. A., 1983. *Word Order Universals: Quantitative analyses of
> linguistic structure*. New York: Academic Press.
>
> Rijkhoff, J. 2009a. On the (un)suitability of semantic categories. *Linguistic
> Typology* 13-1, 95‑104.
>
> Rijkhoff, Jan. 2009b. On the co-variation between form and function of
> adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English. In William B.
> McGregor (ed.), *The Expression of Possession* (The Expression of
> Cognitive Categories [ECC] 2), 51‑106. Berlin and New York: Mouton de
> Gruyter.
>
> Rijkhoff, J. 2015. Word order. In James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), *International
> Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition)*, Vol.
> 25, 644–656. Oxford: Elsevier.
>
> Ross, M. 1998. Proto-Oceanic adjectival categories and their morphosyntax. *Oceanic
> Linguistics* 37-1, 85-119.
>
>
> Jan Rijkhoff
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Lingtyp [ <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] on behalf of Alan Rumsey [
> <Alan.Rumsey at anu.edu.au>Alan.Rumsey at anu.edu.au]
> *Sent:* Monday, January 18, 2016 12:23 PM
> *To:* <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language
> complexity/simplicity
>
> Many thanks to all of you who responded to my posting on this topic, both
> online and off. All the readings you have pointed me to have indeed been
> highly relevant and very useful, including an excellent recent publication
> by Jennifer Culbertson that she pointed me to in her offline response, at
> <http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01964/abstract>
> http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01964/abstract
>
> Thanks especially to Matthew Dryer for pointing out that the Greenbergian
> ‘universal’ I had used as an example – the putative association between VSO
> and noun-adjective order — had been falsified by his much more thorough
> 1992 study “The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations”.  My reading of
> that article and further correspondence with him has confirmed that, by
> contrast, Greenberg’s universals no 3 and 4 were solidly confirmed by his
> study, namely that SOV languages are far more likely to have
> postpositions than prepositions and that the reverse is true for VSO
>  languages.
>
> Drawing on all your suggestions, Francesca and I have now finished a draft
> of the paper referred to in my posting, called 'Structural Congruence as
> a Dimension of Language Complexity: An Example from Ku Waru Child
> Language’. If any of you would like to read it please let me know
> and I’ll send it to you.
>
> Alan
>
>
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> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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