[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

[David Gil]

I've greatly enjoyed following this high-quality discussion: thank you all.

In particular, I think the discussion has helped me to articulate an 
unease that I've always felt about the distinction between 
language-specific categories and what Martin calls comparative 
concepts.I agree wholeheartedly that we need to distinguish between, 
say, the Latin Dative, and a typologically-informed concept of dative 
that the Latin Dative may or may not instantiate to whatever degree.(I 
also agree that it's unfortunate that we don't have enough distinct 
terms to assign to all of these different things, and that we sometimes 
end up falling prey to the resulting terminological confusion.)Where I 
think I part ways with some of my colleagues is that I do not accept 
that language-specific categories and comparative concepts constitute 
two distinct and well-defined ontological types.

Let's take the wing analogy.I agree that a statement such as "bats have 
wings" may be of more interest for somebody interested in comparative 
evolution than for a specialist in bats — in that sense it resembles a 
comparative concept in linguistics.But still, bats do have wings, even 
though they may differ in many ways from those of birds or bees.And yes, 
ontologically bat wings are a very different type of thing than, say, 
whatever feature of bat DNA it is that "generates" those wings.However, 
these different ontological types all have a place within a description 
of bats, even though a bat specialist might be more interested in the 
DNA while the comparative evolutionist will be more interested in the wings.

Getting back to languages, let's consider three hypothetical (and 
somewhat simplistic cases of) languages that Matthew would classify as 
having SVO basic word order:

Language A:has well-defined Ss and Os, and specific linearization rules 
that put the S before the V and the O after it.

Language B:has well-defined Ss and Os, but no linearization rules that 
refer to them; instead it has specific linearization rules that put the 
A before the V and the P after it.

Language C:does not have well-defined Ss and Os, but has specific 
linearization rules that put the A before the V and the P after it.

In Matthew's WALS chapter, all three languages are characterized as SVO; 
this is an example of what Martin and others call a comparative 
concept.And as we have found out over the last several decades, basic 
word order is a very useful comparative concept for us to have.However, 
our three hypothetical languages arrive at their SVO order in very 
different ways, giving rise to the impression that the respective 
bottom-up language-specific descriptions of the three languages will 
share no common statement to the effect that they have SVO word 
order.And indeed, adequate bottom-up language-specific descriptions of 
these three languages should look very different, reflecting the very 
different provenances of their SVO word orders.

However, I would like to suggest that there is also a place within the 
bottom-up language-specific description of each of the three languages 
for some kind of statement to the effect that the language has SVO word 
order (in the sense of Matthew's WALS chapter).Of course this is a 
different kind of statement to the ones previously posited, making 
reference to different levels of description.But we're already used to 
multiple levels of description within language-specific descriptions, 
for example when we talk about Ss and Os but also As and Ps, topics and 
comments, and so forth.So there is no good reason not to allow for a 
WALS-style word-order category such as SVO not to be written into the 
grammatical descriptions of each of our hypothetical three languages, 
even if in some cases it may be "derivative" or "epiphenomenal", and 
even if in some cases it is of relatively little interest to language 
specialists. (Though as Matthew pointed out earlier on in this thread, 
the basic word order facts of a language have implications regarding 
other properties of the language in question even in those cases where 
the basic word order is "derivative" of other factors.)

So what I'm suggesting, then, is that so-called comparative concepts 
have a place in the grammatical descriptions of individual 
languages.This is not to deny that comparative concepts are different 
kinds of creatures, which — by definition — are of greater relevance to 
cross-linguistic comparison than to the understanding of individual 
languages.It follows that the ontological diversity of language-specific 
categories and comparative concepts should be present within the 
grammatical descriptions of individual languages.Some will object to 
this, but I have no problem with the proposition that a good description 
of a language will be ontologically heterogeneous, e.g. containing some 
statements that are psychologically real and others that are not.(I note 
here Eitan's suggestion earlier in this thread that some comparative 
concepts may also be cognitively real.)

Finally, and somewhat tangentially, a practical consideration:a good 
reference grammar, while describing a language on its own terms without 
imposing categories from outside, should at the same time maintain a 
parallel reader-friendly typologically-informed narrative, one of whose 
major tasks is to mention all of those cross-linguistically familiar 
typological categories — e.g. case marking, agreement, gender, and so 
forth — that are absent from the language, if only to reassure the 
reader that the author didn't just omit mention of them for reasons of 
space, lack of interest, or whatnot.


-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-812-73567992

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