[Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

Wed Feb 28 02:16:51 UTC 2018

“Typology” is a bad name since it is associated with a transitory early stage in empirical disciplines where people head out into the wild and bring back novel material to sort into drawers in museums before serious theorizing begins. It is particularly problematic in our case since most post-Greenbergian “typologists” have given up on broad morphosyntactic types in favor of mapping distributions of isolated features or probing for statistical correlations among elements in low-level domains (‘and’ and ‘with’, etc.).

There is a place for those endeavors but “comparative morphosyntax” is a more challenging and important field that is more likely to be taken seriously by general linguists interested in how languages work. It points to big-picture comparisons of entire systems, functional or structural interpretations thereof, and studies of how such systems evolve. The best work in this area is comparison of a few highly diverse languages on the one hand, and of multiple closely related languages on the other. Of course it excludes some "typological" topics such as phoneme inventories, but who cares?

I agree that “comparative linguistics” evokes historical linguistics based on sound correspondences of stems and grammatical morphemes, and is to be avoided. I don't think that "comparative morphosyntax" would be interpreted in this way.

Incidentally, did y’all notice the recent news about the Neandert(h)al symbolic cave paintings in Spain? Collateral damage: the minimalist program.

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 7:49:59 PM
To: Siva Kalyan
Cc: <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

Just as an illustration of non-linguists (or even non-typologists) not understanding the short term "typology". Recently at an event for our research centre I did a short presentation of the field and there were non-linguists in the audience who found it very enlightening, because they had thought that "typology" was the study of how people type language.

/Hedvig

Med vänliga hälsningar,

Hedvig Skirgård

PhD Candidate

The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

School of Culture, History and Language
College of Asia and the Pacific

The Australian National University

Website<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fhedvigskirgard%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=ktZb1MTk2a9HcBXg1ikzqZw2B0OM1W9%2BGEqrkXbhcuk%3D&reserved=0>

2018-02-28 9:18 GMT+11:00 Siva Kalyan <sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com<mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com>>:
I would point out that in English, the term “comparative linguistics” is typically used as a shorthand for “historical-comparative linguistics”, i.e. that part of historical linguistics that concerns itself with genealogical relatedness between languages, reconstruction etc., as opposed to diachronic change within a single language. (See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FComparative_linguistics&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=7n0STkMDkMGVe2%2FaqV%2BKRmF1cXWGOu97d6qU3oVl4p0%3D&reserved=0>.)

I see that in German (according to the corresponding Wikipedia entry), the term vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft has a broader meaning which encompasses both historical linguistics (historisch-vergleichende S—) and typology (allgemein-vergleichende S—); this makes sense of the name of the department in Zurich (otherwise a bit puzzling for an English-speaker).

Thus the use of “comparative linguistics” to refer to (only) linguistic typology would seem to be in competition with existing usage in both English and German. That said, I can see the utility of having a cover term that encompasses both historical linguistics and typology, and would support using “comparative linguistics” in the German sense. I’m not sure if this is within the scope of the current discussion, though.

Siva

On 28 Feb 2018, at 8:10 am, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

Dear all,

What is the name of our subfield (or subcommunity):

“language typology”?
“linguistic typology”?
or maybe simply “comparative linguistics”?

Linguists know that there is no difference between the first two, and they also understand the shorter "typology", but this term is opaque for nonlinguists, and the duality of “language typology”  and “linguistic typology” is inconvenient, because there is incomplete aggregation on sites like Google Scholar and Academia.edu<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Facademia.edu%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=dctRLNTelcmPljj3%2FNB9IDnZVufjSHFmj9t0bMrgCXY%3D&reserved=0>.

(It seems that on Academia.edu<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Facademia.edu%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=dctRLNTelcmPljj3%2FNB9IDnZVufjSHFmj9t0bMrgCXY%3D&reserved=0>, 6354 people are followers of “language typology”, 8732 follow “linguistic typology”, and 7090 follow “typology”, though perhaps not all of the latter mean typology in the linguistics sense.)

Historically, it seems clear that “language typology” is the older term, and has become current in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, it got a competitor ("linguistic typology"), for unclear reasons.

(More on the history of these two terms can be found in the following blogpost: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1022<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdlc.hypotheses.org%2F1022&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=45fV5Txh6OySB%2BC81fWjCu5NrXZo%2BVVmMihuS9WaKbM%3D&reserved=0>)

So I'm wondering: Maybe we should consider switching to an entirely different, fully transparent term, namely "comparative linguistics"?

It seems that there are quite a few well-established fields with “comparative” in their names: comparative economics, comparative education, comparative law, comparative literature, comparative mythology, comparative psychology, and “comparative zoology” even has a famous museum on the Harvard campus.

(So far, at least one department of comparative linguistics in the relevant sense exists: at the University of Zurich,http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en.html<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch%2Fen.html&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=RpRW%2B1qlDM4p3NaFdjufz1oIgF99hHXB96IdddE6x%2Bw%3D&reserved=0>).

I feel that the term “comparative linguistics” for what used to be called “language/linguistic typology” has another big advantage: The term fails to signal association with a particular subcommunity – and this is good. After all, many comparative linguists work in a generative framework, and these do not usually associate with the term “typology”. However, much of what they do is clearly “typological” in the usually understood sense, so it is really odd to exclude this community terminologically.

In any event, the question of the name of our subfield of linguistics seems not gto have been discussed explicitly. Maybe it would not be a complete waste of time to engage in some discussion.

Martin

--
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig

_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=bCSiNAv4BQnoxBupwwFb8gAMnlqi7%2Bp7OrDSsdLgzZ8%3D&reserved=0>

_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=02%7C01%7C%7C8ee5d5af19584eaf452b08d57e4607d5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636553761601146286&sdata=bCSiNAv4BQnoxBupwwFb8gAMnlqi7%2Bp7OrDSsdLgzZ8%3D&reserved=0>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20180228/6b50f224/attachment.htm>