[Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

Larry M. HYMAN hyman at berkeley.edu
Wed Feb 28 02:24:12 UTC 2018


Jeff, some good points, but oh! are you writing off all of phonological
typology? I can see how morphosyntacticians might not be interested in who
has what phoneme or what is the distribution of certain phonetic rarities,
but there is more to the full range of phonological phenomena than
inventories—word-prosody typology, for instance? (I am incompetent to say
how other aspects of language might (not) fit into "comparative
linguistics", e.g. semantics? pragmatics?). If you really want to have a
field that consists solely of comparative morphosyntax, then I guess that's
a good name for it. On the other hand, as a grammatically oriented
phonologist, I have been hoping that phonology would be part of the
enterprise.  For discussion of same, the following is about to appear in
print (we're hoping in April):

Hyman, Larry M. & Frans Plank (eds). *Phonological typology*.
Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.

These are papers that we proposed for a recent ALT meeting, but our
proposal for a workshop was turned down. Rightly so :-)!?

Be on the lookout!

Best, Larry

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 6:16 PM, Heath Jeffrey <schweinehaxen at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> “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>:
>
> 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>
> 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.comparativel
> inguistics.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)
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
France-Berkeley Fund
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19

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