[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

Wed Jan 20 23:05:31 UTC 2016

Here is a quote from Martin's 2010 paper "Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic  studies" in Language 68:3:

"(2) A dative case is a morphological marker that has among its functions the coding  of the recipient argument of a physical transfer verb (such as ‘give’, ‘lend’, ‘sell’, ‘hand’), when this is coded differently from the theme argument.

...given the definition of the comparative concept ‘dative’ in 2, we can go on to test the generalization in 1. This is done by matching the phenomena of languages with the comparative concepts. The Russian Dative matches the ‘dative case’ concept in 2, and so does the Finnish Allative...  Note that we cannot say that the Russian Dative and the Finnish Allative ‘instantiate’ the ‘dative case’ concept, because these categories have many more properties than are contained in the definition in 2. This is the crucial difference between comparative concepts as proposed here and the crosslinguistic categories that I reject."

How can we apply this to the biological example? Are we allowed to say that an eagle's wings "match" the general concept of wings, but not that they "instantiate" it? And is it correct to say that eagles have wings? After all, eagles' wings have many more properties than are contained in the usual definition of a wing (Wikipedia: "a type of fin with a surface that produces aerodynamic forces facilitating movement through air and other gases, or water and other liquids").

östen

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] För Peter Arkadiev
Skickat: den 20 januari 2016 23:35
Till: Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence

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
> Beethovenstrasse 15
> D-04107 Leipzig
>
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