[Lingtyp] comparative concepts

Wed Jan 27 20:05:50 UTC 2016

Dear all,
Doris' point about etic and emic perspectives clarified one more issue
about comparative concepts and language-particular categories for me. Since
two linguists working on a same language might arrive at different analyses
about phenomena found, so-called language particular categories are at the
same time analyst particular categories and I would thus still consider
them to be etic perspectives on a language.

Furthermore, and I might understand Martin Haspelmath's (2010) paper
wrongly, but the way he talked about grammatical concepts I understood them
to be more akin to 'ad hoc' concepts/categories (e.g. things that you need
to build a house). You need them for a particular purpose, but they are
otherwise useless. In this case they are concepts that are used to
meaningfully compare structural-semantic/functional/communicative aspects
of languages.

>From a purely terminological standpoint I would argue that the difference
between a concept and a category is that the concept helps you identify a
set of items and basically 'turns' into a category once a set of items has
been identified. So comparative concepts 'turn' into categories once items
in different languages have been found. These concepts are, however,
somewhat useless to use as an argument for a language particular analysis.
Thus if one finds a group of "lexemes that denote a descriptive property
and that can be used to narrow the reference of a noun" in a particular
language the language cannot be argued to have a grammatical category
adjectives based on this. This is despite the fact that once I identify
such a group of lexemes in a particular language, I still have a category.
This category is just useless for language particular analysis. They can
only be viewed as adjectives for a comparative purposes. The question here
would be, if this definition of a comparative concept adjective should be
used for all comparative purposes involving the idea of adjective?

>From a methodological standpoint, then, if I look for a set of 'adjectives'
as comparatively defined in a language and then try to find language
internal evidence that this group of items (or at least a part of this
group) can be argued for as being its own language specific category
adjective, can I say that I have let the language show itself to me?

Thanks all for reading.

Frank

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 11:54 AM, Everett, Daniel <DEVERETT at bentley.edu>
wrote:

> Good point, Doris. At the risk of harping on a single subject, in my
> forthcoming Chicago press book the etic/emic distinction plays a major role
> in the empiricist theories of language and culture that I try to develop.
> These are very important ideas that have been misunderstood and
> under-estimated for decades outside of some circles.
>
> Dan
>
>
> On Jan 22, 2016, at 1:13 PM, Dlpayne at uoregon.edu <dlpayne at uoregon.edu>
> wrote:
>
> It seems to me that "comparative concept" in Martin's usage is close (if
> not identical) to what is called "etic " while language specific
> "descriptve categories" are "emic cagegories" as discussed by Keneth Pike
> abd used in anthropology long ago, with the additional understanding that
> we are talking about conceptual notions of potential relevance to
> morohosyntax / discourse (not just to sound or eg. "marriage" in
> anthropology, etc.)
>
> Aren't these the same kind of distinctions just under new names by a
> (somewhat) new generation?
>
> Doris Payne
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts
> From: Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu>
> To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> CC: Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts
>
>
> Paolo’s comment here illustrates very well how wings is a comparative
> concept.
>
> The primary motivation for my arguing against crosslinguistic categories
> in my 1997 paper was that linguists would debate for marginal cases whether
> a category in a particular language was an instance of the crosslinguistic
> category, but I argued that such debates were merely terminological, not
> substantive.
>
> Claiming that bats don’t have wings is an example of the same phenomenon:
> it all depends on how you define wings.  Paolo is assuming one
> definition, but many people would assume a different definition.  There
> is no “right” definition.
>
> Matthew
>
> On 1/22/16 10:28 AM, Paolo Ramat wrote:
>
> Hi David,
> your comparison of linguistic facts with bats helps me to clarify (and
> this will be the end of my interventions!) my point: actually, bats don’t
> have wings but a kind of membrane that FUNCTIONS like wings which
> prototypically are formed by an ordered collection of plumes. Similarly, in
> the Lat. construct *me poenitet *the accus. *me *has the same FUNCTION as
> Engl. *I *in *I‘m sorry *or Germ.* mir *in  *Es tut mir leid *(call it
> Patient or Experiencer). Once we have established what wings, PAT or EXP
> are, we can draw more or less narrow comparisons between bats, bees, eagles
> etc. and between  the theta roles implemented by *me, I, mir *etc.
> Consequently, I agree with your conclusions thet “comparative concepts
> [build on linguists’ analysis of languages] have a place in the grammatical
> descriptions of individual languages” and that “the ontological diversity
> of language-specific categories and comparative concepts should be present
> within the grammatical descriptions of individual languages” .  The
> process is twofold : from the empirical observation of bats, bees, eagles
> etc. and Lat.,Engl.,Germ etc. to the creation of comparative concepts (call
> them abstract *tertia comparationis*) back to the analysis of flying
> objects and of linguistic extant data.
>
> Best,
> Paolo
>
> °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
> Prof.Paolo Ramat
> Academia Europaea
> Università di Pavia
> Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia)
>
> *From:* David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>
> *Sent:* Friday, January 22, 2016 3:14 PM
> *To:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] comparative concepts
>
> I've greatly enjoyed following this high-quality discussion: thank you all.
>
> In particular, I think the discussion has helped me to articulate an
> unease that I've always felt about the distinction between
> language-specific categories and what Martin calls comparative concepts.  I
> agree wholeheartedly that we need to distinguish between, say, the Latin
> Dative, and a typologically-informed concept of dative that the Latin
> Dative may or may not instantiate to whatever degree.  (I also agree that
> it's unfortunate that we don't have enough distinct terms to assign to all
> of these different things, and that we sometimes end up falling prey to the
> resulting terminological confusion.)  Where I think I part ways with some
> of my colleagues is that I do not accept that language-specific categories
> and comparative concepts constitute two distinct and well-defined
> ontological types.
>
> Let's take the wing analogy.  I agree that a statement such as "bats have
> wings" may be of more interest for somebody interested in comparative
> evolution than for a specialist in bats — in that sense it resembles a
> comparative concept in linguistics.  But still, bats do have wings, even
> though they may differ in many ways from those of birds or bees.  And
> yes, ontologically bat wings are a very different type of thing than, say,
> whatever feature of bat DNA it is that "generates" those wings.  However,
> these different ontological types all have a place within a description of
> bats, even though a bat specialist might be more interested in the DNA
> while the comparative evolutionist will be more interested in the wings.
>
> Getting back to languages, let's consider three hypothetical (and somewhat
> simplistic cases of) languages that Matthew would classify as having SVO
> basic word order:
>
> Language A:  has well-defined Ss and Os, and specific linearization rules
> that put the S before the V and the O after it.
>
> Language B:  has well-defined Ss and Os, but no linearization rules that
> refer to them; instead it has specific linearization rules that put the A
> before the V and the P after it.
>
> Language C:  does not have well-defined Ss and Os, but has specific
> linearization rules that put the A before the V and the P after it.
>
> In Matthew's WALS chapter, all three languages are characterized as SVO;
> this is an example of what Martin and others call a comparative concept.  And
> as we have found out over the last several decades, basic word order is a
> very useful comparative concept for us to have.  However, our three
> hypothetical languages arrive at their SVO order in very different ways,
> giving rise to the impression that the respective bottom-up
> language-specific descriptions of the three languages will share no common
> statement to the effect that they have SVO word order.  And indeed,
> adequate bottom-up language-specific descriptions of these three languages
> should look very different, reflecting the very different provenances of
> their SVO word orders.
>
> However, I would like to suggest that there is also a place within the
> bottom-up language-specific description of each of the three languages for
> some kind of statement to the effect that the language has SVO word order
> (in the sense of Matthew's WALS chapter).  Of course this is a different
> kind of statement to the ones previously posited, making reference to
> different levels of description.  But we're already used to multiple
> levels of description within language-specific descriptions, for example
> when we talk about Ss and Os but also As and Ps, topics and comments, and
> so forth.  So there is no good reason not to allow for a WALS-style
> word-order category such as SVO not to be written into the grammatical
> descriptions of each of our hypothetical three languages, even if in some
> cases it may be "derivative" or "epiphenomenal", and even if in some cases
> it is of relatively little interest to language specialists. (Though as
> Matthew pointed out earlier on in this thread, the basic word order facts
> of a language have implications regarding other properties of the language
> in question even in those cases where the basic word order is "derivative"
> of other factors.)
>
> So what I'm suggesting, then, is that so-called comparative concepts have
> a place in the grammatical descriptions of individual languages.  This is
> not to deny that comparative concepts are different kinds of creatures,
> which — by definition — are of greater relevance to cross-linguistic
> comparison than to the understanding of individual languages.  It follows
> that the ontological diversity of language-specific categories and
> comparative concepts should be present within the grammatical descriptions
> of individual languages.  Some will object to this, but I have no problem
> with the proposition that a good description of a language will be
> ontologically heterogeneous, e.g. containing some statements that are
> psychologically real and others that are not.  (I note here Eitan's
> suggestion earlier in this thread that some comparative concepts may also
> be cognitively real.)
>
> Finally, and somewhat tangentially, a practical consideration:  a good
> reference grammar, while describing a language on its own terms without
> imposing categories from outside, should at the same time maintain a
> parallel reader-friendly typologically-informed narrative, one of whose
> major tasks is to mention all of those cross-linguistically familiar
> typological categories — e.g. case marking, agreement, gender, and so forth
> — that are absent from the language, if only to reassure the reader that
> the author didn't just omit mention of them for reasons of space, lack of
> interest, or whatnot.
>
> --
> 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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-- 
Frank Seidel, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Center for African Studies at the University of Florida
427 Grinter Hall - PO Box 115560
Gainesville, FL 32611-5560
Tel: 352.392.2183
Fax: 352.392.2435
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