[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Sat Jan 23 10:35:10 UTC 2016

As some of you may have read in the news, the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois has suspended tenured professor of political science Larycia Hawkins, among other things because she has said that Muslims and Christians “worship the same God”. The college referred to “significant questions regarding the theological implications” of her comments. This shows that it is not only linguists who have problems of this kind and that they can sometimes have practical consequences.

östen

Från: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] För Martin Haspelmath
Skickat: den 23 januari 2016 10:45
Till: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

I never took Philosophy 101, but I am trying to understand differences and similarities between languages, and I feel that using descriptive categories for comparative purposes often leads to confusion.
On 22.01.16 22:25, Östen Dahl wrote:
I agree with Matthew that the issues are becoming too complex and at the same time with Dan that this is Philosophy 101. But the questions asked in that course are often the most difficult ones. The quotation from William James may be relevant here. It seems to me that what Martin is saying about “cleric” as a comparative concept means that pace James this concept cannot be an objective one, since apparently it is just a "product of our cognitive system", as opposed to chemical elements, which are something more. (But Locke said that all categories are products of our cognitive system??)

I think Locke was wrong there (at least for the practical purposes of science) – some categories are NOT just the products of our cognitive system, but exist in the world, independently of any observers. "Hydrogen" and "photon" are such categories, as are "red fox" and "Lezgian language" (otherwise foxes wouldn't be able to interbreed and speakers would be able to interact and conform to norms). I have talked about such categories as "natural kinds" (though I haven't read the philosophical literature about them), and I think they constitute discoveries of science, not just instruments for discoveries.

According to generative grammar, categories such as vP or [+wh] or [+coronal] are also natural kinds – existing in the world independently of the observers, and (at least potentially) discoveries of generative grammar. This is a possibility that we should take very seriously, but my interim conclusion is that this approach doesn't work well – to compare languages fruitfully, one needs concepts that are set up specifically for the purposes of comparison, as *instruments* for further discoveries. (Balthasar Bickel has sometimes said that typological variables are like measures – I like this analogy, because it's clear that concepts such as "meter" are not discoveries, but are nevertheless crucial to science.)

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.

Östen continues:

I am not quite sure I am following here. Does the difference between “cleric” and “hydrogen” depend on the differences in well-definedness or on the fact that “cleric” is based on social constructs whereas “hydrogen” is a natural phenomenon? I get confused when Martin mentions the theoretical possibility of an innate mental category of “cleric” – that would seem irrelevant to me.

Hydrogen is a discovery (a natural kind), but "cleric" (in the comparative sense) is a construct of comparative religion scholars, i.e. an instrument for discoveries. "Well-definedness" is an issue only for comparative concepts. We don't need definitions for natural discoveries such as "red fox" or "hydrogen" or "Lezgian language", or "vP" (note that generativists never define their categories, which is completely consistent with their claimed status as natural kinds). The suggestion of an innate mental category "cleric" was meant to be patently absurd, but maybe for other categories of social organization (e.g. grandfather or marriage), this is less absurd.

Volker Gast has made an intriguing suggestion:

This discussion seems to show a broad consensus that we do not actually generalize over linguistic data, but over comparative concepts/linguists' classifications. ... So I wonder if WALS should be renamed to the 'The World Atlas of Comparative Concepts'? ;-)

I wouldn't say that we don't generalize over "linguistic data", but it is true that we don't generalize over grammars (in the strict sense), just as comparative biologists (e.g. scholars concerned with the relative wing ratio of bats and birds<http://jmammal.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/4/412.2.abstract>) do not generalize over genomes. (As a historical anecdote, it may be interesting that the very first working name of WALS was "The grammar atlas" – I still have an e-mail from David Gil from November 1998, when we were starting to work on this project, which has this in the subject line).

So if grammars are analogous to genomes, the totality of our linguistic behaviour (within a speech community) is analogous to phenotypes. I would say that typologists generalize over these phenotypes – compare Matthew's point that usage frequencies also play an important role for word order typology. Whether these phenotypes are well described by the term "structures" is indeed a good question – I must say that I would associate the term "structure" more with "grammar", perhaps using "grammatical patterns" for the phenotypes. "World Atlas of Grammatical Patterns"?

Best,
Martin

--

Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

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Leipzig University

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