[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

[Paolo Ramat]

Edith has rightly written:”Categorization, by its very concept, does not require that the two things that are lumped together share all of their properties.[...] 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? [...] 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.”
Thus, we come back to the concept of category prototypical examples/items I proposed in my previous contribution to the present discussion : some items belonging to the category VERB may lack some feature that is present in a prototypical verbal form (say, different grams for singular and plural) but share TAM distinctions.  But nobody seems to take account of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance and  the prototype concept in our discussion.
Consequently, this raises again the problem alluded to by Edith:  “what categories EXIST and which are IMPOSED UPON THE DATA by the analyst's specific purposes”  (and I may again refer to my article Linguistic categories and linguists’ categorizations. “Linguistics” 37/1999: 157-80.)

Best
Paolo



From: Edith A Moravcsik 
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2016 7:18 PM
To: Matthew Dryer ; Peter Arkadiev ; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence

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

.
    






    






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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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