[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Fri Jan 22 16:26:58 UTC 2016

Dear Edith and all,

I have followed this discussion with great interest. Let me just add a
minor comment to Edith's question:

French adjectives and Italian adjectives differ considerably in their
syntax and semantic potential:

- very few Italian adjectives may occur in pre-nominal position; in French
the relevant subset is very large;
- there are many minimal contrasts of meaning between ADJ N and N ADJ in
French (e.g. la dernière semaine du mois - la semaine dernière
(deictic))), there are only few cases in Italian (una certa signora - una
cosa certa)as far as I know.
- many adjectives may occur either pre-nominally or post-nominally without
a contrast in meaning in French (une rue large - une large rue); there are
not many instances of this variation in Italian (again: as far as I know)
- some prenominal adjectives together with their nouns have been
lexicalized in French (bonhomme, gentilhomme); I do not know whether this
is also the case in Italian.
The overall generalization is that French has been strongly influenced by
the surrounding Germanic languages.

In summary: this gives us a comparative concept 'adjective' and two
descriptive categories 'adjectives in Italian', 'adjectives in French';
there are good empirical reasons for drawing such a distinction, a
surprising conclusion for two closely related languages. A comparison
between Italian and Spanish, by contrast, would not reveal such striking
contrasts. Do we then change our terminology?

Thank you for your contributions and best wishes,

Ekkehard

> Dear Eitan (and All),
> Thank you for your thoughts. There is a lot in your message to think
about
> but let me just get back to the question of whether, say, French
adjectives and Italian
> ones do or - as you say- do not form the same descriptive category. By
what definition of the concept "descriptive category" is this so? What
would French and Italian adjectives have to look like in order for us to
be able to class them as members of the same descriptive category? Is
this
> an empirical issue, or should we adopt a principle
> by which constructions of different languages can never be members of
the
> same descriptive category? If the latter, why should we adopt such a
principle?
> Best,
> Edith
> ________________________________
> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>
> Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 4:31 AM
> To: Martin Haspelmath
> Cc: LINGTYP
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts
> Dear all,
> Thanks for this fascinating discussion!
> I've always found the distinction between descriptive categories and
comparative concepts to be extremely helpful, and have thought a bit
about
> some of the issues that Edith Moravcsik raises. If one takes the
distinction seriously, then yes, adjectives in French and Italian are
different descriptive categories, and so are the categories of two
different stages of a language. In fact, types of historical changes
(assimilation, pathways of grammaticalisation, etc.) are also
comparative
> concepts, in a sense, since the individual processes of change in actual
languages are usually distinct.
> The distinction between descriptive categories and comparative concepts
also helps to clarify the ways in which borrowings are integrated into a
target language, as I've argued in a recent paper
> (https://www.academia.edu/13522922/Language-specific_transitivities_in_contact).
Unlike Martin Haspelmath's definition of comparative concepts, I wonder
if
> they might nonetheless be cognitively real in a sense, at least for
multilingual speakers who often match structurally distinct descriptive
categories due to a common function (as in Yaron Matras' notion of
'pivot').
> [http://a.academia-assets.com/images/open-graph-icons/fb-paper.gif]<https://www.academia.edu/13522922/Language-specific_transitivities_in_contact>
Language-specific transitivities in
> contact<https://www.academia.edu/13522922/Language-specific_transitivities_in_contact>
www.academia.edu
> This paper argues that transitivities are language-specific descriptive
categories, and the comparison of donor-language transitivity with
target-language transitivity reveals fine-grained degrees of loan-verb
integration. Based on a comparison of
> An additional advantage of the distinction between descriptive
categories
> and comparative concepts that (I think) hasn't yet been pointed out here
is that it can help typologists to maximize variables for
cross-linguistic
> comparison. If two language-specific categories are taken to be
> instantiations of the same cross-linguistic category, the differences
between them are usually downplayed. On the other hand, discussions
often
> focus on whether something really 'is' an instance of Crosslinguistic
Category X (say, noun incorporation). If it's similar enough but not
identical to a category identified in another language, it can be dubbed
'Pseudo-Category X' (say, pseudo noun incorporation) and then we have a
new term in linguistics.
> However, if one works with a broad comparative concept, everything that
is
> not part of the definition can be turned into a variable. This seems to
be
> especially valuable in frameworks like the one proposed by Balthasar
Bickel in his 2010 and 2011 papers on multivariate analysis (e.g.,
http://www.zora.uzh.ch/57331/).
> Although he is careful to distinguish his approach from those of Martin
Haspelmath and Gilbert Lazard in these papers, I think that they are
compatible, in that comparative concepts (e.g., 'clause linkage')  can
be
> starting points for multivariate analyses, and multivariate analyses
tell
> us what properties actually cluster together. This kind of bottom-up
perspective can turn up really new insights.
> Best wishes,
> Eitan
> Eitan Grossman
> Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> Tel: +972 2 588 3809
> Fax: +972 2 588 1224
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 11:55 AM, Martin Haspelmath
> <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
> 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<mailto: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
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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