[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

[David Gil]

On 24/01/2016 13:46, William Croft wrote:
> 1. David Gil argues that syntactic categories "based exclusively on distributional criteria, and...blind to the semantics" can be defined as comparative concepts. But distributional criteria are criteria defined by a construction or constructions in a specific language, and so by definition are not comparative: the constructions are constructions of particular languages. This is what makes grammatical categories language-specific, and in fact construction-specific.
Under Martin's definition of comparative concept, Bill is right in 
saying that "distributional criteria are criteria defined by a 
construction or constructions in a specific language, and so by 
definition are not comparative: the constructions are constructions of 
particular languages."  But I would like to suggest that the kinds of 
categories that we typologists deal with (and which I somewhat loosely 
referred to as comparative concepts) in fact do not provide a perfect 
fit to Martin's definition of comparative concept.

Martin raised the hypothetical case of two languages with identical 
grammars differing only with respect to their lexicons.  Now let's 
imagine a hypothetical world in which these were the only two languages 
in existence.  In such a hypothetical world, language-specific 
categories would be identical to cross-linguistic categories.  Now 
obviously our real world is very different from such a hypothetical 
world, but how different exactly?  At the opposite extreme one can 
imagine another world with several thousand languages each of which is 
endowed with its own individual constructions incommensurate with those 
of each and every other language.  Many linguists would say that this is 
the actual world that we inhabit.  I would like to suggest (a) that the 
positioning of our real world of languages in relation to these two 
extremes should be considered an empirical question, not a matter of 
belief or philosophical persuasion; and (b) that the factually correct 
answer is that our real world of languages actually lies in-between 
these two extremes, albeit probably closer to the 
several-thousand-incommensurate-languages extreme than is commonly 
assumed not just by generativists but also by many other linguists 
belonging to various other camps.

In other words, I argue that there do exist categories that are, 
simultaneously, manifest in the grammars of individual languages and 
also relevant to cross-linguistic comparisons.  My (2000) paper referred 
to in my previous posting was an attempt to define some syntactic 
categories which fit this bill.  Since these categories yield useful 
typological insights, I somewhat sloppily referred to them in the 
preceding discussion as comparative concepts, which is what Bill 
correctly took issue with above.  But my response is to suggest that the 
current definition of comparative concept may not be the most useful 
one.  Of course, the specifics of that proposal could easily be wrong, 
but it's the principle that is at issue here.

But for a simpler example of a category / construction type that is both 
language-specific and universal, how about "utterance", defined roughly 
as what occurs in-between two periods of silence.

Following are two related reasons why we should expect to find 
language-specific categories which are shared by more than one language, 
and hence which might be useful also for cross-linguistic categories.

The first (as pointed out by Eitan earlier) is the phenomenon of 
bilingualism.  Bilinguals are clearly capable of providing (necessarily 
imperfect) translations from one language to another; it is hard to see 
how such an ability can be accounted for without positing certain 
correspondences between languages — not just at a "deep" level of 
conceptual representations, but also with respect to more readily 
observable formal properties.

The second reason is the phenomenon of language-internal variation, be 
it geographical, social, idiolectal, or whatever.  We linguists are good 
at telling our laymen friends that there's no difference between 
languages and dialects, but we sometimes fail to internalize this 
message ourselves.  In fact, many if not all of us are competent in a 
multiplicity of registers or varieties of our native languages — how 
many such varieties exactly is a moot question since it depends on 
arbitrary decisions concerning the level of resolution that we wish to 
adopt.  So if I speak a Home-English and an Office-English, do these 
have two separate grammars which just happen to be virtually identical, 
or do they share a single common grammar with (Labovian) specifications 
for those areas which exhibit variation?  If the former, then it would 
be absurd not to admit that the two separate grammars share lots of 
categories.  If the latter, then well, if there's no difference between 
dialects and languages, then just as my Home-English and my 
Office-English will share categories and constructions, so, as a 
bilingual, will my English and my Hebrew (albeit presumably fewer).

To summarize:  While I agree with many of my typologist colleagues that 
languages are massively more different from each other than is commonly 
supposed by many, perhaps most, other linguists, I do not believe — as I 
suspect some do — that languages may differ without bounds.  Moreover, 
while I agree that many of the most influential proposals that have been 
made in the past (e.g. by generativists) for categories that are, 
simultaneously, language-specific and universally valid are 
fundamentally misguided, I do not believe that we should throw the baby 
out with the bathwater and reject the possibility that such 
language-specific-cum-universal categories may nevertheless exist.

-- 
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