[Lingtyp] terminology

[Randy J. LaPolla]

Hi All,
Sorry to be a bit late with this, but I was travelling and am just catching up.

I am attaching an article by Bar-Hillel from 1957. Aside from getting the feeling that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”, the article, which also presents a two=way distinction in types of terms (see esp. §3), may be of use for those interested in these issues. It is from the point of view of a logician and strict empiricist.

Randy
-----
Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （羅仁地）
Professor of Linguistics and Chinese, School of Humanities 
Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive | Singapore 637332
http://randylapolla.net/
Most recent book:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324






> On 1 Aug 2018, at 12:47 AM, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> On 26.07.18 11:52, Johann-Mattis List wrote:
>> There's a common practice in programming and mathematics to collect
>> "problems" in the field. E.g., problems of graph theory, problems of
>> algebra, etc. People know that these may be extremely hard to resolve,
>> maybe even impossible, but they agree on the nature of the problem, and
>> then try to build up solutions for them, which also produce new
>> terminology, etc. In linguistics, I have the impression that we are often so overwhelmed by the feeling of how impossible it is to fully
>> describe something in explanatory terms, that we forget to even state
>> what the problem is, that we even forget to *describe* what we want to
>> explain. We can definitely learn from our colleagues in other branches
>> of science here in being a bit more pragmatic, less obsessed with the
>> detail (at least at first), but also more systematic in applying our
>> methods and techniques.
> 
> I fully agree with these sentiments, though I wouldn't say that it has to with a lack of "pragmatism" on the parts of linguists.
> 
> Rather, many linguists don't even *want* to make a difference between explanation and description, for principled reasons: They think that finding the right universal categories is the main research task of linguistics, and it's only after we have found them that we can describe languages properly. So linguistics is like chemistry: We first need to find the elements (and ideally the entire Periodic Table) before we can describe each compound properly.
> 
> This is of course the research programme of (traditional, 20th century) generative linguistics, but if one adopts a different research programme, where description and explanation are logically separate, then we can aspire to a more cumulative approach (I have a recent blogpots about the difference between the two approaches: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1167).
> 
> So in order to agree on a common terminology, we don't need to agree that the concepts have a "deep reality" (= are established research results). We can just agree that they are useful for some purposes and that they have a clear meaning – they are not more than "units of measurements" (e.g. the SI units in physics, which are not research results either).
> 
> Best,
> Martin
> 
> -- 
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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> D-07745 Jena
> &
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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