[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

Fri Jan 22 09:25:04 UTC 2016

Good point ! Linguists’ categorizations are lumping together language (apparently)-specific categories (or better: language-specific properties). But what does it means “enough languages”? Are two languages capable to build a cross-linguistically valid category? Or how many languages can constitute a minimal ‘enough’ ?

Paolo

From: Hedvig Skirgård 
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 12:49 AM
To: Edith A Moravcsik 
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence

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.

  _______________________________________________
  Lingtyp mailing list
  Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
  http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160122/56669b48/attachment.htm>