[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

[Martin Haspelmath]

Thanks, Östen, for raising these important points again. I remember our 
discussion well. Yes, the distinction between "match" and "instantiate" 
is subtle, and I'm not sure that the terminology I chose was ideal.

On 22.01.16 15:40, Östen Dahl wrote:
>
> 1) I was, and am still, puzzled about a distinction Martin made (see 
> his 2010 paper) between "matching" and "instantiating" (“the crucial 
> difference between comparative concepts as proposed here and the 
> crosslinguistic categories that I reject”). A language-specific 
> category (the German Dative) does not "instantiate" the comparative 
> concept 'dative', it just "matches" it. Philosophers often say that 
> something "falls under" a concept. Gottlob Frege used the German 
> locution "unter einen Begriff fallen". For instance, Martin could be 
> said to fall under the concept 'typologist', which of course could be 
> claimed to be just a fancy way of saying that he is a typologist. I 
> assume that scholars in other disciplines where comparative concepts 
> are used would agree that "fall under" could be used about them. Thus, 
> to use Martin's example, Pope Francis could be said to "fall under" 
> the concept 'clergy' (or maybe better: 'clergyperson'). But I also 
> think he could be said to "instantiate" that concept. So my question 
> to Martin is whether he would agree that the German Dative "falls 
> under" the comparative concept 'dative'.
>

The point here is that many linguists assume (sometimes explicitly, more 
often implicitly) that there is a fixed set of categories that languages 
might have, just as there is a fixed set of chemical elements that are 
found in the world. So when we discover a new celestial body (e.g. 
Planet Nine <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine>, for which there 
now seems to be good evidence), we expect that the chemical elements 
found there will *instantiate* some of the existing elements.

Thus, chemical elements are more than "products of our cognitive system" 
(as John Locke said about categories – thanks to Jan Rijkhoff for this 
nice quote). They are a hypothesized (and overwhelmingly confirmed) set 
of "cross-planetary", universal categories. They are true discoveries of 
physical constraints on possible materials, not mere instruments of 
comparison (at least this is my understanding)

So I would NOT say that Pope Francis instantiates a universal category 
of cleric, but merely that he matches the (arbitrary) definition of 
"cleric" as it might be proposed by a comparative religion scholar. Some 
other scholar might argue that this is not a useful comparison, and that 
he should rather be compared to monarchs, or human rights activists, or 
whatever. (Maybe there is a school of "Universal Religion" scholars who 
think that we are born with a set of cognitively possible religious 
categories – for these scholars, Pope Francis might indeed instantiate 
the cleric category.)
>
> 2) Peter Arkadiev brought up the notion of a "cross-linguistic 
> gram-type" that Joan Bybee and I introduced in our 1989 paper,  which 
> were said to be "identifiable by their semantic foci and associated 
> with typical means of expression" and contrasted against 
> language-specific grams (grammatical items such as morphemes and 
> constructions). Later on, I have said that gram-types are "clusters of 
> grams in grammatical space". I wonder if Martin sees any essential 
> differences between this approach and his.
>

I think gram-types are comparative concepts, but there seems to be an 
additional claim involved, namely that grams cluster in a non-accidental 
way, such that they tend to be more similar to esach other than one 
would expect from a purely semantic (e.g. tense-logical) point of view.

It seems to me that the Dahl and Bybee work of the 1980s was extremely 
insightful and constituted great progress, but it would be even better 
if it were made clear what exactly the claims are and how they could be 
falsified. The semantic-map model which was used in later work (e.g. van 
der Auwera & Plungian on modality's semantic map in 1998) seems better 
suited to expressing falsifiable claims; apparently the notion of 
gram-type was not so prominent in later semantic-map work, for whatever 
reason.
>
> 3) Finally, here is a new puzzle for me: In his latest posting, Martin 
> uses the word "analytical" several times, seemingly suggesting that it 
> is equivalent to "descriptive", although it is not combined with 
> "category" but with "terms", "concepts", "issues", and "notions". And 
> in the final paragraph he also speaks of "universal analytical 
> notions". So I wonder if you Martin could explicate what you mean by 
> "analytical" and how it differs (if at all) from "descriptive"? And 
> could you give an example of a "universal analytical notion"?
>

For me, "description" and "analysis" are the same thing (sorry for using 
both terms interchangeably). A universal analytical (or descriptive) 
notion would be "hydrogen", or "atom".

In grammar, I know of no such universal analytical notions (or universal 
descriptive categories), though some semantic/pragmatic notions such as 
negation and interrogation seem to come close.

Best,
Martin

P.S. Re David's posting: I agree that describing languages from a 
cross-linguistic perspective (using comparative concepts) is often 
useful, but before engaging in this kind of two-tiered description, one 
should have understood the essential differences.

-- 
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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