[Lingtyp] How do typologists use examples in grammars?

Thu Jun 17 15:08:22 UTC 2021

Bravo all around.

Marianne

On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 5:08 AM Peter Austin <pa2 at soas.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear Adam
>
> Thanks for raising the issue that "Glosses or translations are treated as
> "truth", rather than as heuristics or expositional devices respectively", and
> for pointing to Tony Woodbury's brilliant article on "thick translation".
>
> However, I think the situation for many language documenters and
> describers is even more complex than some typologists might think. The case
> study in Tony's paper deals with BILINGUAL translation (Cup'ik-English)
> where the target language is also the language of the description (and its
> metalanguage), whereas in many other instances we are dealing with
> TRILINGUAL contexts, or even more complex linguistic situations, and here
> the relationships between "translations" are typically even less
> transparent. Many a grammar has been written in English, say, where the
> speaker community lingua franca is something else (Spanish, Kriol, Tamil),
> and often a non-standard local version of that. All the data collection and
> fieldwork interactions may have been done in the lingua franca, and then
> the grammar is published in a third language -- we may reasonably ask:
> where did the English translations of the consultants' e.g. non-standard
> Tamil come from? Did someone fluent in both languages provide it, and if so
> who was that person and are they identified for the quoted example
> sentences? More commonly, it is the linguist author who does the
> "translation" from the consultants' translation to English, with all the
> indeterminacy that another layer of interpretation introduces (not least
> the non-native speaker abilities in the lingua franca of the linguist). So,
> to be really "thick" the grammar should include the speaker's translation
> (which may well be audio-visually documented) along with the grammar
> writer's translation into the language of the grammar where it differs from
> the lingua franca. Lest this seem overly pedantic, it is completely in line
> with calls for "replicability" (no "reproducibility", as you have it, and
> which is impossible to achieve) as well as emphasizing further layers of "heuristics
> or expositional devices" that grammars rely on.
>
> As Haj Ross had it, it's turtles all the way down.
>
> Best
> Peter
>
> On Thu, 17 Jun 2021 at 10:56, Adam James Ross Tallman <
> ajrtallman at utexas.edu> wrote:
>
>> Some of these issues depend somewhat on how each of us do typology and
>> the way we read grammars. I would endorse all of the statements given so
>> far, but would also highlight one aspect of grammar writing that I think we
>> need to work on as a community.
>>
>> I often wish descriptive grammarians were more forthcoming about
>> alternative analyses, when data point in different directions, and aspects
>> of the language that are just not understood yet. This is important for
>> reproducibility, but also I think grammars can have an important function
>> in mapping out domains that require future research. In typology, we could
>> potentially code uncertainty in the analysis if that information is
>> present(see here <https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.130.12aud>)
>> resulting in more reliable inferences.
>>
>> Personally, I think the attitude of typologists (or confessional
>> "theoreticians") has sometimes had a detrimental effect here. There is
>> often an assumption that a lack of certainty on the descriptivist's part
>> regarding how to present or analyze some grammatical fact of a language
>> automatically translates to a lack of knowledge about the language or
>> linguistics in general, when I think, often the opposite is true. It is
>> because the descriptive linguist has a detailed understanding of the
>> phenomena that it cannot be easily fit out with the typologist's
>> terminology or naively constructed comparative concepts ("what!? you don't
>> understand where/what a word is in your language, come back to me when you
>> really *understand* the language (if not linguistic theory in general
>> *sniff*)!").
>>
>> The upshot of this attitude, and the fact that descriptive and
>> documentary linguistics was demoted in prestige in the 1960s (although
>> things are changing), is  that the descriptivist is impelled to pretend
>> (and then eventually believe) that a much more straightforward analysis is
>> licensed. Analyses for which there are mountains of supporting data are
>> treated the same as those made as best guesses. Glosses or translations are
>> treated as "truth", rather than as heuristics or expositional devices
>> respectively. I think this tendency is changing as a consequence of the
>> development of documentary linguistics and archiving practices, but I think
>> descriptive linguists have special insights about methodological and
>> analytic challenges that could make their ways into grammars more often. Or
>> in short, I want thick translation
>> <http://www.elpublishing.org/docs/1/04/ldd04_07.pdf>, and also thick
>> analysis, to be common in grammar writing.
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Adam
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 5:56 AM Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Daniel,
>>> Chelliah, Shobhana. 1997. A Grammar of Meithei. MGL 17. Berlin & NY:
>>> Mouton de Gruyter.
>>> is one grammar that does the two line (phrase and clause) translation
>>> consistently. It certainly helps with the interpretation.
>>>
>>> Randy
>>> -----
>>> *Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA* （羅仁地）
>>> Professor of Linguistics, with courtesy appointment in Chinese, School
>>> of Humanities
>>> Nanyang Technological University
>>> HSS-03-45, 48 Nanyang Avenue| Singapore 639818
>>> http://randylapolla.net/
>>>
>>> On 17 Jun 2021, at 6:05 AM, Daniel Ross <djross3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> This has been a useful discussion and I generally agree with the points
>>> made by others already.
>>>
>>> But one thought I'd like to add to this discussion is the importance of
>>> the third line, the English translation itself (or whatever the language of
>>> description is). Whenever any not-at-issue feature is included in an
>>> example, we may rely on that third-line translation for an intuitive
>>> understanding of the function of the morphemes in an example beyond what
>>> the gloss indicates, especially when it is a relationship between
>>> morphemes. A basic illustration of this problem would be the choice to
>>> render a verb unmarked for tense as past tense in an example (probably
>>> corresponding to the context of the original elicitation, even though that
>>> may not be indicated when it is used as an isolated example out of
>>> context), or similarly the choice of "he" or "she" for a general 3SG
>>> pronoun unmarked for gender.
>>>
>>> This is a bigger problem, though, when we consider combinations of
>>> morphemes. The glosses can tell us something about the individual
>>> morphemes, but they don't indicate how to interpret their combination. For
>>> example, could there be some interaction between a tense marker and mood?
>>> The gloss doesn't indicate that, only the translation (and possibly some
>>> other section in the grammar that addresses it directly, if included).
>>>
>>> The only solution I can suggest for this would be to include two
>>> translations, expanding the traditional three-line model to four lines:
>>> first a literal translation, and second a more idiomatic English version.
>>> For some examples that might seem excessive, but I think often it would be
>>> incredibly helpful. English simply doesn't function like many languages it
>>> is used to describe, and having an awkward-in-English but more literal
>>> translation would help me as a typologist to understand how the language
>>> works internally rather than through the lens of English. To some degree
>>> the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss is supposed to be used for that purpose, but
>>> again it doesn't indicate anything about the semantics of those morphemes
>>> when combined. And quite rarely we do have exceptional examples with a
>>> literal translation indicated, but almost exclusively when that particular
>>> phenomenon is at-issue in that particular section of a grammar, not
>>> elsewhere, and often only when there is an obvious lexical mismatch (e.g.
>>> in a collocation), not so much for grammatical functions. Personally I
>>> would also be comfortable with a less idiomatic English translation,
>>> because I think it would be helpful to have the reader pause a moment to
>>> try to understand the example in the sense of its usage in the language
>>> being described, rather than assuming functional equivalence to an English
>>> rendering. Of course that shouldn't go too far as to leave the meaning
>>> unintelligible in English.
>>>
>>> To illustrate this, here is an excerpt from a recent publication where I
>>> mentioned this issue (page 53 of:
>>> https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692099-002). I point out that more
>>> familiar purposive forms are often used to translate Prior Associated
>>> Motion, because that category is not so familiar for the typical European
>>> languages used to write grammars. And even when the language does have a
>>> corresponding form like English "go and get" (or "go get"), authors may not
>>> be so comfortable using it, despite it actually being a better translation.
>>>
>>> *"Glosses in English can sometimes be misleading: 'go (in order) to
>>> [verb]' should be expected for purposives, whereas 'go and [verb]'[34]
>>> should be expected for Prior [Associated Motion],[35] and rarely do
>>> grammars specifically describe the semantics of such constructions beyond
>>> the glosses.*
>>>
>>>
>>> *[34] That is, pseudocoordination..., which problematically is not
>>> itself widely recognized for its Prior AM semantics, resulting in potential
>>> confusion for both authors and readers of descriptive materials.*
>>> *[35] Glosses in languages other than English are often similarly
>>> unhelpful, especially when these meanings are not typically distinguished
>>> (e.g. Spanish ir 'go' + INF, used to gloss either purposive 'go (in order)
>>> to' or Prior AM)."*
>>>
>>> This meant that in the survey I was not able to confidently distinguish
>>> between Purposive and Prior motion in all of my sample languages, so I had
>>> to report them together as a single type.
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 10:30 AM Peter Austin <pa2 at soas.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Tamsin Donaldson's grammar of Ngiyampaa (CUP, 1980) is exemplary in
>>>> providing this kind of sociocultural and utterance context. An oldie but a
>>>> goodie.
>>>>
>>>> Best
>>>> Peter
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 16 Jun 2021, 17:17 Marianne Mithun, <
>>>> mithun at linguistics.ucsb.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks Francoise and Lena! I heartily agree!
>>>>>
>>>>> (And now that we're not buying so much paper and ink, this really
>>>>> doesn't increase the cost so much.)
>>>>>
>>>>> Marianne
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 3:15 AM Françoise Rose <
>>>>> francoise.rose at univ-lyon2.fr> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Dear all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I will send my answers to Eline in a private message, but I would
>>>>>> like to share a recent experience regarding examples in grammars.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I am presently reviewing Lena Terhart’s grammar of Paunaka (a PhD
>>>>>> thesis). The author gives this notice regarding how examples are introduced
>>>>>> in the grammar:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> “One peculiarity of this work is that most examples are introduced
>>>>>> by briefly providing
>>>>>>
>>>>>> the extralinguistic context. This is usually not done in grammatical
>>>>>> descriptions. I
>>>>>>
>>>>>> started with this at some point, when I felt that context was
>>>>>> necessary for understanding
>>>>>>
>>>>>> and then extended it further and further. Thus, the reader will not
>>>>>> only learn about
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Paunaka, but also gain knowledge about the narratives and personal
>>>>>> life stories of the
>>>>>>
>>>>>> speakers throughout this work. Whoever is irritated by this is kindly
>>>>>> asked to simply
>>>>>>
>>>>>> overlook it. »
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I generally appreciate a lot when authors add important information
>>>>>> on the context of the extract (usually in brackets before the free
>>>>>> translation). I was yet planning to be one of the readers who would just
>>>>>> overlook these example introductions because my sense was that these
>>>>>> introductions would be useful sometimes only (in my view, mainly in
>>>>>> sections concerning discourse issues). Actually, it turned out that I
>>>>>> appreciate this practice very much: knowing the context very often gives a
>>>>>> very clear interpretation to the sentence and strong indications on how the
>>>>>> linguistic features under scrutiny works. Also, this is a very strong
>>>>>> indication that the linguist perfectly understands what the sentence is
>>>>>> about. I can attest that, as a fieldworker on culturally very distinct
>>>>>> cultures from mine, I do not always understand the contribution of every
>>>>>> sentence to the conversation/narration. Finally, this gives also a sense of
>>>>>> familiarity with the culture involved in the grammar, which is extremely
>>>>>> pleasant.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Here are two randomly-picked examples from the grammar:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Consider (516), which is about making something fall, just like (510)
>>>>>> above. It also comes from a description of the frog story,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> but this sentence was produced by Miguel and referred to another
>>>>>> picture, the one on which the dog has made the beehive (or: wasp nest) fall.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A similar example comes from María S. who had just stated that
>>>>>> smoking is bad
>>>>>>
>>>>>> and now provides the reason:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Best to you all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Françoise
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *De :* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> *De la
>>>>>> part de* Eline Visser
>>>>>> *Envoyé :* lundi 31 mai 2021 15:15
>>>>>> *À :* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>>>>> *Objet :* [Lingtyp] How do typologists use examples in grammars?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Dear typologists,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I’d like to learn more about how you use the examples given in
>>>>>> grammars. I have just finished a grammar myself, and will continue to do
>>>>>> descriptive work in the future, and this is a topic that fascinates me. I'm
>>>>>> especially interested in knowing if one can discern the traits of a good
>>>>>> example (for typological use). I’d be glad if some of you could take the
>>>>>> time to answer the questions below, either briefly or elaborately. You can
>>>>>> email me the answers. Also, if there’s is anything published on this topic
>>>>>> please do let me know.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1. In general, do you prefer short (let’s say <1 line) or longer (> 1
>>>>>> line) examples? Elaborate if you wish.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 2. In general, do you have a preference for examples from a certain
>>>>>> genre? Which? You can interpret genre broadly or narrowly, in which ever
>>>>>> way you like: monologue, dialogue, anecdotes, recipes, hymns,
>>>>>> picture-matching tasks…
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 3. In general, do you have a dispreference for examples of a certain
>>>>>> genre?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 4. Say you have two examples that illustrate your point equally well.
>>>>>> What could be a deciding factor for choosing one over another?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 5. Say you can’t find an example that illustrates your point well. On
>>>>>> a scale from 1-5, how likely is it that you will go to the language’s
>>>>>> corpus or the attached texts in the grammar to find one yourself? (1= very
>>>>>> unlikely, 5 = very likely)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 6. Anything else you’d like to share about examples in grammars? Feel
>>>>>> free to rant.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Eline
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> P.s. For those who ordered a Kalamang grammar hard copy - they’re in
>>>>>> Sweden, I’m in Norway, traveling isn’t as easy as I thought yet, so this
>>>>>> takes a bit longer than I thought, sorry!
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Adam J.R. Tallman
>> Post-doctoral Researcher
>> Friedrich Schiller Universität
>> Department of English Studies
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