[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Sun Jan 24 13:38:30 UTC 2016

Apologies for jumping into a discussion in which so many senior colleagues have made much more qualified comments. But surely the issue is not whether anybody believes that 'languages may differ without bounds'?

Don't the differences of opinion rather lie in whether in order to discover the nature of those 'bounds' it is most 
sensible to presuppose categories based on our deep analysis of the relatively limited range of individual languages we have at our disposal, or that we would like to treat the extent of the variation as an empirical question (and how to best do that)?

Both positions would seem entirely defendable to me, but result in very different conceptualisations of typology.

Best,
Stef
________________________________________
Van: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] namens David Gil [gil at shh.mpg.de]
Verzonden: zondag 24 januari 2016 13:25
Aan: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Onderwerp: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts

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

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