[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Fri Jan 22 23:19:06 UTC 2016

Dear all,

I have always wondered why linguists tend to predominately look for
comparable approaches in the natural sciences rather than in the humanities
and social sciences. I say this because "Ethnology" in cultural
anthropology is a sub-field that is similar to linguistic typology trying
to arrive at universal claims about human behavior. Many of the problems
and discussion points touched upon here have been discussed in the field of
cultural anthropology for a long time. If you read German, a useful
introduction to this is Thomas Schweizer's chapter in Fischer 1998. One
will find many similarities between typology and the intercultural
comparative methodologies. One methodological consensus in ethnology is
that it is useful to distinguish between a theoretical construct and
observable behaviors in individual cultures. Congruence of concepts between
culture is only necessary for theoretical constructs not for individual
indicators in different cultures. [I think this here is relevant to Matthew
Dryer's and Randy La Polla's discussion in a previous instantiation of this
email exchange]. And most importantly individual indicators in different
cultures need not be theoretically equally relevant (Schweizer 1998). There
has also been a longstanding discussion in terms of the development of an
appropriate pattern of concepts for individual intercultural comparisons.

One classic example of a comparative ethnological study is Beatrice
Whiting's (1950) study of the relationship between the importance of
sorcery in a society and the presence of a specialized legal apparatus in a
society. She used 50 ethongraphic descriptions for her study of this
phenomenon. The outcome looked somewhat like the following:

Sorcery is not important in 3 societies where a specialized legal system is
absent.
Sorcery is important in 30 societies where a specialized legal system is
absent
Sorcery is important in 5 societies where a specialized legal system is
present.
Sorcery is not important in 12 societies where a specialized legal system
is present.

The study supported the claim that one important function of sorcery is
social control.
[This in response to Edith A. Moravcsik query. I hope this helps a little
bit.]

Furthermore, in cultural anthropology there has been a longstanding debate
and discussion on the quality of sources and how to deal with poor sources.
This has repercussions to cross-cultural comparison in terms of what
sources to allow in such studies. The question for typology then is, is it
methodologically appropriate to use a grammar written by someone that only
worked with one single consultant who in turn has lived outside of his own
linguistic community for the past 30 years for typologcial comparison? Or
should such a grammar be disallowed (or at least in need of a thorough
critical discussion when used)? And if such grammars are disallowed, what
would constitute a good documentary study of a language in order to be
included in typological comparison.The linguistic data problem is a subject
that in Linguistics (and Typology) has given newfound and important
attention in the wake of Himmelmann's 1998 or Woodbury's 2003 critique of
linguistic data collection practices and the rightful claim that higher
order linguistic analysis (to which typology belongs) needs a properly
collected and theorized data basis. A treatise also worthwhile reading (if
you read Italian) in this regard is Simone Raffaele (2001): Is Linguistics
not rather a pseudo-science where proper argumentation and not empiricism
(in the narrow sense, of designing repeatable experiments) are the vehicles
of knowledge. The answer (Yes, it is a pseudo-science like philosopy) makes
queries in terms of Popper's understanding of science and scientific
progress through falsifiability (see Martin Haspelmath in this discussion)
somewhat futile.

In this regard I would like to highlight Volker Gast's contribution to this
study who pointed to epistemology where many of the problems that have in
some way or other been discussed here, have been discussed for a long time.
I think it is important to be much more thorough in elaborating on the
relation between language data, ontological status of concepts, proper ways
of data collection, analysis and description and the various more general
epistemological and philosophical discussions. To give you an illustration
in regards to language data: Without claiming that I have interpreted the
following author's correctly, what Himmelmann (2012) calls 'raw' language
data comes across as being based in nearly positivistic understanding of
data. In contrast, Christian Lehmann's (2004) discussion of language data
highlights the interdependent relationship between data and theory and
seems to have as a backdrop a realist understanding of the world. Finally,
some of Haspelmath's (2009) wording made me think that he is actually
promoting a soft-theoretical position originating in Heidegger's
ontological hermeneutics with a pretheoretical stance towards the object of
our understanding. ("What we need instead is the researcher's ability to
discover completely new, unexpected phenomena, to detect previously
unsuspected connections between phenomena, and to be guided solely by the
data and one's own thinking") I am not claiming that I am representing what
the author's meant to say correctly, but the fact that we are somewhat
sloppy in tying our work to different epistemological backgrounds and
understandings makes it somewhat difficult to, on the one hand, properly
compare individual language descriptions, and on the other hand it makes
the methodological principle to understand languages on their own terms
(see for example Randy La Polla's comment in a previous instantiation of
this discussion) somewhat wishy-washy. And typologists might very well come
at this from different epistemological angles, and for each understanding a
language on it's own terms has a different quality.

Thank you all for reading.

Frank

Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Data in Linguistics. *The Linguistic Review* 21,
175-210.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Framework-free grammatical theory. In Bernd Heine
& Heiko Narrog (eds.) *The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis*,
341-365. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics.
*Linguistics* 36(1), 161-195.

Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Data in Linguistics. *The Linguistic Review* 21,
175-210.

Schweizer, Thomas. 1998 (1983). Interkulturelle Vergleichsverfahren. In
Hans Fisher (ed.)
*Ethnologie. Einfuehrung und Ueberblick, 4th edition. Berlin: Dietrich
Reimer, 379-397. *

Simone, Raffaele. 2001. Sull’ utilita e il danno della storia della
linguistica. In: Storia del pensiero linguistico: linearità, fratture e
circolarità. Atti del Convegno della Società Italiana di Glottologia,
Verona, 11–13 novembre 1999, Giovanna Massariello Merzagora (ed.), 45–67. Roma:
il Calamo.

Whiting, Beatrice. B. (1950). Paiute Sorcery. New York: Viking Fund
Publications in Anthropology, No. 15.

Woodbury, Anthony C. 2003. Defining Documentary Linguistics. *Language
Documentation and Description* 1, 35-51.

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 1:46 PM, Paolo Ramat <paoram at unipv.it> wrote:

> Right! There is no right definition –at least in humanities: what is
> ‘democracy’? what is ‘joy’ ?  Still we badly need definitions. I wrote
> somewhere (I don’t remember exactly when and where) that definitions are
> neither false nor true, but useful or useless. And to define a plane as a
> vehicle with wheeles  does not get the point; it is a useless definition
> (though true).  You can say that planes have wings from the functional
> point of view, but not from the morphology  viewpoint. Saussure said “C’est
> le point de vue qui crée l’objet”...
>
> But I have really to stop!
> Many thanks for this discussion!
>
> Paolo
>
>
>
> *From:* Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu>
> *Sent:* Friday, January 22, 2016 6:55 PM
> *To:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts
>
>
> Paolo’s comment here illustrates very well how wings is a comparative
> concept.
>
>
>
> The primary motivation for my arguing against crosslinguistic categories
> in my 1997 paper was that linguists would debate for marginal cases whether
> a category in a particular language was an instance of the crosslinguistic
> category, but I argued that such debates were merely terminological, not
> substantive.
>
>
>
> Claiming that bats don’t have wings is an example of the same phenomenon:
> it all depends on how you define wings.  Paolo is assuming one
> definition, but many people would assume a different definition.  There
> is no “right” definition.
>
>
> Matthew
>
> On 1/22/16 10:28 AM, Paolo Ramat wrote:
>
> 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 <gil at shh.mpg.de>
> *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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-- 
Frank Seidel, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Center for African Studies at the University of Florida
427 Grinter Hall - PO Box 115560
Gainesville, FL 32611-5560
Tel: 352.392.2183
Fax: 352.392.2435
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