[Lingtyp] What do glossing labels stand for?

[William Croft]

OK, well, I would then change one word in Sebastian's statement: in the third clause, have it begin "for heuristic reasons" (cf. the heuristics for category labels I referred to that's in in chapter 1 of my morphosyntax textbook). I presume the document at EVA was written before Martin fully expressed the distinction between comparative concepts and language-specific (descriptive) categories.

I think that part of the issue is that the heuristic value of a category label (e.g. Dative for a case marking used on argument phrases encoding recipients) is interpreted as a theoretical statement. On the other hand, we grammar/IMT readers could reasonably assume that "Dative" in the grammar 'at least matches some idea of what datives are like'. But not necessarily; I've seen quite a few language-specific categories in grammars where I would not choose heuristically the label that the author chose. Caveat emptor!

Bill

On Jan 26, 2016, at 3:14 PM, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se> wrote:

> OK, do I understand this correctly? The labels stand for language-specific categories, but normally we arbitrarily choose labels that are names of comparative concepts, without asserting "any relation between the morpheme being glossed and a comparative concept however defined (beyond the mnemonic usefulness).". But at the same time, according to the document at https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php, the glosses are intended to "give information about the meanings and grammatical properties of individual words and parts of words". Can you do that without asserting any relation between the comparative concept identified by the label and the meaning of the item being glossed? The document says: "In many cases, either a category label or a word from the metalanguage is acceptable". Does this mean that lexical glosses are also only mnemonic? 
> 
> There is also a pedagogical problem here. There is no mention in the document of the distinction between descriptive categories and comparative concepts. The question is if people who write typological papers as well as those who read them understand the significance of glosses. I think there is a general tendency towards fundamentalism in most of us in the sense that we tend to take things more literally than they were intended to. So I suspect that most people who see the gloss DAT will think that it means that the author really thinks that the form in question is a dative, or at least matches some idea of what datives are like. Or that if the German word "Pferd" is glossed as 'horse', that means that it means 'horse'. In other words, it might be worth having some discussion in the document about these problems. 
> 
> östen  
> 
> 
> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
> Från: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] För William Croft
> Skickat: den 26 januari 2016 17:23
> Till: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] What do glossing labels stand for?
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> Bill
> 
> On Jan 26, 2016, at 1:11 AM, Sebastian Nordhoff <sebastian.nordhoff at glottotopia.de> wrote:
> 
>> Dear list,
>> - a language-specific category is a concept with a label chosen by the 
>> linguist.
>> - the label is in principle arbitrary.
>> - for mnemonic reasons, a label evocative of the concept being 
>> described is normally used.
>> - since some labels are rather long, it is convenient to abbreviate them.
>> - some abbreviations have several plausible expansions (SUPerlative, 
>> SUPeressive, SUPine)
>> - a standardization of the match abbreviation-long label is therefore 
>> useful for disambiguation purposes. This is what the Leipzig glossing 
>> rules do in my opinion
>> - the Leipzig glossing rules therefore match abbreviations with common 
>> concept labels. An author using a Leipzig gloss does, however, not 
>> assert any relation between the morpheme being glossed and a 
>> comparative concept however defined (beyond the mnemonic usefulness).
>> 
>> Best wishes
>> Sebastian
>> 
>> 
>> On 01/25/2016 09:27 PM, Östen Dahl wrote:
>>> Here is a question that I would like to pose to the members of the ALT list. If we accept the distinction between "descriptive categories" and "comparative concepts", what do the labels we use in glossing example sentences stand for - in particular, the labels defined in the Leipzig glossing rules? I have some thoughts about this myself but would like to hear what others think first.
>>> östen
>>> 
>>> 
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