[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

[Peter Arkadiev]

Martin, I agree that doing typology is of course different from language description, but I am reluctant to subscribe to the view that these are two fully disjoint enterprises with entirely different logical and epistemological bases. You give Dahl's "Tense and aspect systems" as an example, but in my view this work is notably not only about comparative concepts and typology, but also about ways to adequately describe particular languages, which has been proved by successful application of TMA questionnaire to many languages beyond the initial sample. If, based on the TMA questionnaire, one says that "language A has a past perfective", this is a statement which makes sense from the point of view of the system of this language, not only for the purposes of comparison. Moreover, I am wondering how typology of grammatical systems can be achieved without taking into account how the systems of particular languages work.

Best,

Peter

-- 
Peter Arkadiev, PhD
Institute of Slavic Studies
Russian Academy of Sciences 
Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow
peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
http://www.inslav.ru/ob-institute/sotrudniki/279-peter-arkadiev


20.01.2016, 12:06, "Martin Haspelmath" <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>:
> On 19.01.16 20:58, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
>>  if, as Matthew says, "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", what's the point of classifying the given language as SVO in the first place?
>
> Yes, this does sound paradoxical, but as Matthew says, "describing or
> analyzing a particular language is a completely different enterprise
> from classifying the language typologically". This point needs to be
> more widely recognized.
>
> When a typologist uses comparative concepts such as "ergative
> construction", or "serial verb construction", there is a real potential
> for confusion, because these labels can also be used for
> descriptive/analytical purposes. In fact, the labels of these
> comparative concepts were of course borrowed from the descriptive labels.
>
> But there are other cases where there is no such confusion, for example
> when someone bases their comparison on parallel texts (as in Bernhard
> Wälchli's pioneering work), or on translation questionnaires, as in
> Östen Dahl's (1985) book on tense and aspect. In parallel-text typology
> and questionnaire-based typology, each text passage or each sentence is
> a (lower-level) comparative concept, but nobody would think that
> individual sentences should be used as descriptive categories. Still,
> most people agree that it is useful to compare languages on the basis of
> parallel texts or translation questionnaires.
>
> The broader point is that there is no other way of doing rigorous
> typology than via separate comparative concepts, i.e. that we need to
> give up the hope that the categories that we find in individual
> languages will in the end converge on something universal. This hope is
> being pursued in generative linguistics, but not with significant
> success, it seems.
>
> Best wishes,
> Martin
>
> --
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10
> D-07745 Jena
> &
> Leipzig University
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>
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