[Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

Wed Feb 28 06:54:49 UTC 2018

Dear fellow-typologists

with my apologies for saying the same thing twice, I am sending round an excerpt from the stocktaking article that appeared in LT in 2016 ('Typology and coevolutionary linguistics'). I think the problem is not in the name – I don't think the progress of mathematics has been held back by the inaccuracy of its original Greek meaning of 'what one learns', 'what one gets to know', nor does 'grammar' suffer from the fact that it originally included the study of literature. If the field is doing exciting, novel work, and doing a better job than we have done in terms of explaining the power of our methods to outsiders from whatever field, then the meaning of the term will evolve in its own way. I suspect that abandoning it for a new term will simply signal confusion and a disconnect from the field's roots.

Best Nick Evans

However, the utility and interest of the field [of typology] has been hobbled by its insufficient embedding in a general theory of how diversity should be accommodated and explained in our general theories of language. This is, of course, not just a problem of typology, since the whole field of linguistics has been notably lacking in integrative frameworks or an overall statement of its philo- sophical premises, and its notorious division into mutually unengaged schools has tended to result in “typologists”, “generativists”, “descriptivists”, “historical linguists”, and so forth being seen as adherents of different belief-sets rather than taking different approaches to the study of language which ultimately all need to be integrated.

Consider biology, the field offering us the most plausible parallels in terms of how general principles should be integrated into the study of diversity. If we search for the nearest analogue of typology there, it is PHENETICS, the study of organismic features outside any cladistic or evolutionary framework. The fact that this term is likely to be unfamiliar to many readers of this article should give pause, and make us ask why linguistic typology seems so often to have hidden its candle under a bushel. I would argue that the explanation is simple: that the really interesting questions about variability arise once one adopts a framework closer to SYSTEMATICS in biology (Michener et al. 1970) which is equally interested in the description, taxonomy, evolutionary history, and adaptations of organisms. Systematics thus integrates the study of the “what” and the “where” – long staples of typology – with the “how” (diachronic typology) and, less familiarly for typologists, the “why”, in the form of explanations that should ultimately account not only for how each point in the design space has arisen, but also for what is common, what is rare, what typological traits go together or not, and – more controversially – what types of extralinguistic setting they are found in.

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 4:59:51 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

Yes, in the past (before Greenberg), "comparative linguistics" was primarily used for historical-genealogical linguistics, but this use seems to be long obsolete (as I note in my blogpost: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1022).

At MPI-SHH in Jena where I work now (perhaps currently the best-funded place where people are engaged in historical-genealogical studies), people use terms like "evolutionary linguistics" or "phylogenetic linguistics".

Incidentally, there is no difference between "comparative linguistics" and "vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft" – the latter was used for historical-genealogical linguistics, but is now obsolete in this sense. Balthasar Bickel uses it in the broader sense that I have suggested.

But there is an English-German contrast in that nobody uses "linguistische Typologie" – this sounds like a different meaning is intended, namely "typology of linguistics"; and who knows, maybe this is intended by the shift from "language typology" (= typology of languages?) to "linguistic typology" (= typology in linguistics?).

Martin

On 28.02.18 03:51, Dan I. SLOBIN wrote:
And I've lectured to confused non-linguists who wonder what all of these strange phenomena have to do with "topology."  All of this back and forth shows that there's no rubric that a complex set of questions can fit under.  I share Martin's misgivings--but do remember that we have a journal and an association dedicated to "linguistic typology" --as much as I wish there was an English equivalent of vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft.

Indeed, in the historical framework, typological and taxonomic studies are precursors to more systematic science.  That was, for example, the contribution of Linnaeus.  We're still at the stage when we need good descriptive work, and we don't have to be apologetic about that.  Sometimes I see us as a collection of Linnaeus's waiting for Darwin, not knowing what Darwin will need.

Dan

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 4:49 PM, Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com<mailto:hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com>> wrote:
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://sites.google.com/site/hedvigskirgard/>

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.)

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<http://academia.edu/>.

(It seems that on Academia.edu<http://academia.edu/>, 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)

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).

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
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Leipzig University
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Dan I. Slobin

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University of California, Berkeley

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Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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&
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D-04109 Leipzig

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