[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Fri Jan 22 15:28:40 UTC 2016

Hi David,
your comparison of linguistic facts with bats helps me to clarify (and this will be the end of my interventions!) my point: actually, bats don’t have wings but a kind of membrane that FUNCTIONS like wings which prototypically are formed by an ordered collection of plumes. Similarly, in the Lat. construct me poenitet the accus. me has the same FUNCTION as Engl. I in I‘m sorry or Germ. mir in  Es tut mir leid (call it Patient or Experiencer). Once we have established what wings, PAT or EXP are, we can draw more or less narrow comparisons between bats, bees, eagles etc. and between  the theta roles implemented by me, I, mir etc.  
Consequently, I agree with your conclusions thet “comparative concepts [build on linguists’ analysis of languages] have a place in the grammatical descriptions of individual languages” and that “the ontological diversity of language-specific categories and comparative concepts should be present within the grammatical descriptions of individual languages” .  The process is twofold : from the empirical observation of bats, bees, eagles etc. and Lat.,Engl.,Germ etc. to the creation of comparative concepts (call them abstract tertia comparationis) back to the analysis of flying objects and of linguistic extant data.

Best,
Paolo

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
Prof.Paolo Ramat
Academia Europaea
Università di Pavia
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia)

From: David Gil 
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 3:14 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org 
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

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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