[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

[David Gil]

On 23/01/2016 18:45, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> Edith Moravcsik asked: "It is impossible in principle for 
> constructions in two languages to be members of the same descriptive 
> category?" I would say yes, because descriptive categories are set up 
> on a language-specific basis ("distributionally", to use Bill Croft's 
> word) for the purposes of description (or analysis). Hypothetically 
> one could imagine two languages that have exactly the same grammar 
> (but different words), and in that case, one might say that they share 
> descriptive categories. Perhaps at a lower level, this situation is 
> actually found – so maybe with respect to the behaviour of property 
> words, Italian and Spanish are indeed close to identical. In that 
> case, it would not do any practical harm to say that they have the 
> same descriptive category. But we normally describe each language 
> separately (e.g. we do not skip the description of Spanish adjective 
> syntax and point to an already existing description of the same facts 
> in an Italian grammar), i.e. we treat each grammar as an indivisible 
> unique system.
In the following paper I argued that it is in fact possible to compare 
purely formal constructions across languages:

Gil, David (2000) "Syntactic Categories, Cross-Linguistic Variation and 
Universal Grammar", in P. M. Vogel and B. Comrie eds., /Approaches to 
the Typology of Word Classes/, Empirical Approaches to Language 
Typology, Mouton, Berlin and New York, 173-216.


I am aware that the above paper may strike many readers of this thread 
as not too dissimilar from lots of formal generative gibberish.  But 
crucially, the syntactic categories that I define there are based 
exclusively on distributional criteria, and are blind to the semantics.  
Indeed, in different languages, the same syntactic category may contain 
items of very different semantic types.  Crucially, in the context of 
the present discussion, the syntactic categories posited therein are 
both valid for individual languages and, at the same time, useful for, 
and in fact partly motivated by, cross-linguistic comparisons.

Contrary to many of my colleagues, I am actually more skeptical about 
the cross-linguistic validity of semantic categories than I'm about 
purely formal ones.  (For example, the semantic category of property 
denoting seems to me to be at least as problematical as the 
morphosyntactic category of attributive expressions.)

-- 
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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