[Lingtyp] Probabilistic typology vs. typology-based grammatical theory

[Eitan Grossman]

Hi Hedwig,

What sometimes happens with putative rarities is that someone claims to
have found a rarity and then others say 'hey, I have that in my language
too.' This might be in part due to descriptive linguists taking existing
typological accounts as a kind of baseline ('in Siewierska's sample, there
are no languages with property X'), but obviously the number of languages
that *aren't* in typological samples is much greater than the number of
languages that are, so it's reasonable that what looks like a rarity might
turn out to be more common or less restricted in terms of distribution. But
without the initial claim that a given property is rare, the whole issue
might never come up. To my mind, this means that it's worthwhile to make
explicit claims about the rarity of linguistic properties.

As for the question of spoken data, I'm not sure what you mean by 'some
features affected by genre seem like they're something else'. But if you
mean that some usage features might be treated as grammatical or something
like this, then it might be worthwhile to note that there's recently been a
move to treat discourse phenomena as language-specific descriptive
categories rather than as 'instantiatiations' of universal discourse
categories (e.g., focus, topic, etc.). Some linguists have claimed that
language-specific devices have very particular functions, and only
secondarily give rise to topic or focus readings. Some recent examples of
this are:

Matić, D., & Wedgwood, D. (2013). The meanings of focus: The significance
of an interpretation-based category in cross-linguistic analysis. Journal
of Linguistics, 49, 127-163.
Ozerov, P. (2015). Information structure without topic and focus.Differential
Object Marking in Burmese. Studies in Language 39/2, 386-423.
-- (2015). Telling a story with (almost) no tenses: the structure of
written narrative in Burmese. Linguistics 53/5: 1169-1201.

Best,
Eitan




Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809
Fax: +972 2 588 1224

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 6:01 AM, Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com>
wrote:

> (My private worry is that some of these things are not as rare as they
> seem, simply because the conventions of language description are so
> different across language families, areas and just over time and
> theoretical schools. That coupled with the fact that modern descriptivist
> collect more spontaneous natural data than previous researchers might have,
> so that some features that might be effected by genre seem like they're
> something else. All of this combined with some other considerations make me
> want to restrict the type of questions one can ask given a certain kind of
> data. I trust grammars to be able to represent word order quite well, but
> not focus constructions in narratives for example.)
>
> /Hedvig
>
> *Hedvig Skirgård*
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>
> On 27 January 2016 at 13:05, Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu> wrote:
>
>> Peter,
>>
>> As I said in a recent posting, I personally find the unusual phenomena
>> MORE interesting than the dominant patterns. That is partly because I
>> simply find them intrinsically interesting, partly because they add to the
>> evidence how different languages can be, and partly because they so often
>> show that what was thought to be an absolute universal is actually
>> statistical. My hunch is that these unusual phenomena represent a tiny
>> random subset of what is possible but unusual in language, that there are
>> many equally likely phenomena that by accident are not attested in the
>> world's languages.
>>
>> Matthew
>>
>>
>> On 1/26/16 5:38 PM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
>>
>> Thank you, Matthew, for clarifying this - but nonetheless, I maintain
>> that even those "non-dominant" patterns whose rarity is apparently due to
>> some kind of "functional deficience" (e.g. non-efficiency in Hawkins'
>> terms) or whatever else we consider "linguistic reasons", deserve close
>> attention.
>> Just to give an example I myself consider to be both striking and
>> telling, the system of "multiple case marking" in Kayardild as described by
>> Evans (1995) and insightfully reanalyzed by Erich Round (2013) is clearly a
>> typological rarissimum, but on the other hand I believe that it is
>> revealing of the deep mechanisms possibly at work in all or most languages.
>> Even if you are reluctant to accept the last point which might sound
>> "generativist", I would still argue that there is nothing "unnatural" or
>> "dysfunctional" in the grammatical system of Kayardild, just to the
>> contrary, this is one of the most transparent and logical linguistic
>> systems ever attested.
>>
>> Round, Erich R. (2013). Kayardild Morphology and Syntax. OUP.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Peter
>>
>> --
>> Peter Arkadiev, PhD
>> Institute of Slavic Studies
>> Russian Academy of Sciences
>> Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow
>> peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
>> http://www.inslav.ru/ob-institute/sotrudniki/279-peter-arkadiev
>>
>>
>>
>> 26.01.2016, 17:21, "Matthew Dryer" <dryer at buffalo.edu>
>> <dryer at buffalo.edu>:
>>
>> Matthew writes: "The rara are relevant to typological work in that they
>> are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things,
>> and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical importance. But
>> they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining
>> why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining
>> why the dominant patterns are dominant."  I think this issue is also
>> more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has
>> argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic
>> reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow
>> "better" than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities,
>> many of which might well have happened to become rare because of
>> non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his
>> "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common might have well
>> changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological
>> settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns
>> are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be
>> instructive to forget about frequencies of certain patterns in language
>> samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.  Best,  Peter
>>
>>
>>
>> I have devoted considerable effort in my published research discussing
>> the problem that Peter describes, showing how it is often the case that a
>> particular language type may be more frequent for nonlinguistic reasons and
>> proposing ways to factor out these nonlinguistic factors. Thus what I mean
>> by “dominant” does not mean more frequent, but more frequent for what are
>> apparently linguistic reasons.
>>
>>
>>
>> Matthew
>>
>> On 1/26/16 7:10 AM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
>>
>> Matthew writes:
>> "The rara are relevant to typological work in that they are crucial for demonstrating the range of ways that languages do things, and in so far as that is theory, they are of theoretical importance. But they are not particularly relevant to the theoretical goal of explaining why languages are the way they are, which I think is primarily explaining why the dominant patterns are dominant."
>>
>> I think this issue is also more complex, since, as we all know and as e.g. Elena Maslova (2000) has argued, dominant patterns may be dominant for all sorts of non-linguistic reasons, and therefore claiming that more frequent patterns are somehow "better" than rare ones is a logical mistake. The same concerns rarities, many of which might well have happened to become rare because of non-linguistic factors. Moreover, as argued e.g. by Trudgill in his "Sociolinguistic Typology", what is rare and what is common might have well changed during the last millenia due to the changes in socioecological settings. Therefore I would rather say that both dominant and rare patterns are exlananda on their own right, and that sometimes it might be instructive to forget about frequencies of certain patterns in language samples so that these frequencies don't bias us.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Peter
>>
>>
>>
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