[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

Thu Jan 21 23:49:44 UTC 2016

Forgive me for being naïve, but I had always thought that in theory any
comparative concepts or gram-types can be construed but it's only
worthwhile to investigate those that seem interesting and pragmatically
possible to test for in enough languages.

I.e. I can create the concept of "tennis balls + green apples" being
co-lexifed, but that's probably not going to get me any closer to
understanding language history or contact.

I had understood the major point of comparative concepts and lg-spef
descriptive concepts and grams and gram types as drawing to attention the
simple fact that, as Dryer was writing earlier, lg-spec categories could be
infinite and typologist necessarily lump - and the characteristics of those
lumps are necessarily fewer than the lg-spec categories and they should not
be directly assumed to be the same as the lg-spec categories. I.e
comparative categories are necessarily a simple abstraction of more
detailed lg-spec categories (perhaps like phonemes are abstractions of
lumps of phones). These comparative concepts can be construed at different
levels, for example "romance adjectives" or "determiners globally". (We
could also get into how this relates to idiolects and dialects, but perhaps
not now..)

It would appear that I might have been reading "too little" into all of
this and misunderstood things, though. I just thought I'd say this as I
suspect it's what other junior diversity linguists also think.

/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 22 January 2016 at 05:18, Edith A Moravcsik <edith at uwm.edu> wrote:

> Regarding the distinction between descriptive categories and comparative
> concepts, there are three  things that am unclear about.
>
>
> 1/ HOW MUCH SIMILARITY IS ASSUMED TO BE NEEDED FOR CATEGORIZATION?
>     Given the proposal that descriptive categories have no crosslinguistic
> validity, the question is how much similarity
>
>     is required between similar constructions of two languages before we
> can lumped them into a single category. Categorization, by its
>
>     very concept, does not require that the two things that are lumped
> together share all of their properties. We use categories
>
>     so that once one property is identified for something, another one is
> predictable and thus its occurrence is in a sense
>
>     explained. Thus a mutual or unidirectional implicational relation
> between two properties is sufficient to justify a
>
>     category and it does not matter if in many other ways, token of the
> proposed category are different. Is it the case that even by
>     this minimal criterion, all descriptive categories are strictly
> language-specific?
>
> 2/ THE VALIDITY DOMAIN OF DESCRIPTIVE CATEGORIES
>      As Martin Haspelmath has proposed, descriptive categories differ
> across languages and as Bill Croft has proposed, they are
>
>      different even across the constructions of a single language. I think
> more discussion is needed on the domain issue.
>      Are descriptive categories different across two related languages -
> e.g. adjectives in French and Italian -
>
>      as well as across two subsequent historical stages of a language
> (e.g. Middle English and Modern English) and two dialects or
>      styles of a single language? What about two sentences of a language?
> That there may be some differences is not relevant; the question
>      for categorization is only whether there are at least two properties
> that remain constant.
>
>
> 3/   IS THE ISSUE EMPIRICAL OR LOGICAL?
>
>       As Oesten Dahl has noted, it is important to clarify whether some or
> all other scientific inquiries in various fields also
>
>       distinguish between descriptive categories and comparative concepts.
> How about cross-cultural studies, comparative
>
>       literature, comparative religion, and the various fields of natural
> science? It seems implausible that the distinction
>
>       would be linguistics-specific. If it is not, how is the distinction
> defined and utilized in other fields?
>
> Regarding the issue of what categories EXIST and which are IMPOSED UPON
> THE DATA by the analyst's specific purposes, I find
>
> the survey of this issue in the natural sciences very eye-opening as given
> by Stephen Goldman's DVD series "The science wars. What scientist
> know and how they know it" (available from the company "Great Courses",
> also known as "The Teaching Company"). In it, Goldman
> runs through much of the history of physics and related fields and the
> accompanying philosophical discussions to demonstrate how
> different scientists and philosophers have assessed the contributions of
> "the facts of reality" and of "the human mind" to scientific proposals .
> There is a clearly some contribution from both sides but a definite
> delimitation of each is elusive - a moving target.
>
>
> Best,
>
>
> Edith Moravcsik
>
> .
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
> Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 20, 2016 7:54 PM
> *To:* Peter Arkadiev; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence
>
> On 1/20/16 6:59 PM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
>
> Going back to word order, if we say that a language has prepositions we
> already know something about this language's grammar, moreover, we are able
> to make predictions about what else can be found in this language and with
> what probability, aren't we?
>
> Actually, if we know that a language has prepositions, we can only make
> limited predictions about the grammar of the language. If we know that a
> language has prepositions, we can predict that it is either a language
> whose grammar specifies the word order as VO or a grammar that has no rule
> governing the order of verb and object but where the factors conditioning
> the choice between OV and VO word order result in more frequent. But since
> the latter is not a fact about the grammar, you can make fewer predictions
> if you restrict attention to grammar.
>
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>
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