[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Sun Jan 24 22:44:20 UTC 2016

I wonder if “utterance”, as defined below, is really being defined in “distributional” terms. The definition given seems to be phonological; and I would suggest that it should also be defined interactionally (e.g. as a stretch of speech within which no change of speaker can occur; cf. the notion of "Turn Construction Unit” in Conversation Analysis). Thus, for this particular case (I haven’t yet read David’s 2000 paper), I’m not sure that this *isn’t* a comparative concept (provided that comparative concepts can make reference to phonology and discourse pragmatics).

More generally, I wonder if what seem like distributionally-defined universal categories might actually be defined with respect to “constructions" that are *themselves* comparative concepts. E.g. if we had a comparative concept of “clause”, then we could define a category “verb” as “the head of a clause”; this would be a category defined distributionally with respect to a comparative concept, and thus would arguably also be a kind of comparative concept.

I do agree that distributional classes of some sort need to be definable cross-linguistically; to elaborate on David’s two reasons, let me mention the existence (and indeed, near-ubiquity) of code-mixing. It would be impossible for a bilingual to borrow a “Language A Noun” into Language B without somehow knowing that (some) Language A Nouns can go in the same slots as (some) Language B Nouns.

Siva

> On 24 Jan 2016, at 11:25 PM, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> 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
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> 
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