[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

[Martin Haspelmath]

On 21.01.16 19:18, Edith A. Moravcsik wrote:
> 3/   IS THE ISSUE EMPIRICAL OR LOGICAL?
>
>  As Östen 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?
>

Comparative concepts are widely used in other disciplines when a 
comparative approach is adopted (I talked about this briefly in my 2010 
paper, §9). I even found a paper published in a law journal that uses 
the term "comparative concept" (http://www.ejcl.org/22/art22-1.html).

Another example is the comparative study of folktales, where researchers 
use the "Aarne-Thompson classification index 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson_classification_systems>". 
For biology and anthropology, I recommend Charles Nunn's book "The 
comparative approach in evolutionary anthropology and biology 
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo11462152.html>". 
And for astronomy, the discussion about the classification of Pluto (is 
it a planet or not?) shows that the comparative concepts in other 
disciplines can also be pretty arbitrary. In comparative religion, terms 
like "clergy" are clearly useful for comparison, even though Catholic 
priests and Protestant ministers play very different roles within the 
system of the religion (and thus the fact that different 
denomination-specific terms are used for them is not an accident).

What may be special in linguistics is that the task of 
analyzing/describing an individual language is so challenging and 
absorbing. 90% of all linguists only ever study a single language, I 
think, and even those that adopt a comparative approach are usually very 
knowledgeable and concerned about analytical issues. Thus, our 
analytical terms are very prominent, and for many centuries, people have 
simply carried them over from one language (such as Latin) to another 
one (such as French, Russian, Persian and so on). That there is a 
problem with this dawned on them only in the early 20th century – and it 
required deep concern with Native American languages to understand it 
(those linguists who mostly focused on the bigger languages blissfully 
ignored the Boasian insights, including the generativists). I think in 
other fields, the confusion between analytical and comparative concepts 
was not so much of a problem, because the distinction was obvious – 
perhaps also because the diversity is more obvious in other fields.

(There my also be fields where separate comparative concepts may not be 
needed, because comparison in terms of universal analytical notions is 
sufficient. I'm thinking of chemistry – it's surely no accident that 
Mark Baker compared linguistics to chemistry in his utopian 2001 book 
"The atoms of language". It seems that chemists have indeed been 
successful in figuring out the universal blueprints of stuff, and they 
can compare kinds of stuff via the blueprints.)

Best,
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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