[Lingtyp] (non)discrete concepts

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear all,

The discussion of mood in "non-finite" environments quickly arrived at a 
point where we seem to be ending up repeatedly, as shown by the 
following exchange between Adam and Christian:

On 15.07.23 06:45, Christian Lehmann wrote [emphasis added]:
> Dear Adam [Tallman] and everybody, just a brief reply to this:
>> For a functional-typological audience, I'm sort of surprised the 
>> distinction is still brought up as if it was discrete (or not just a 
>> matter of definition as Martin points out), since Bybee discussed the 
>> issue of inflectional status as a continuum with lexical/derivational 
>> in her Morphology book some 30+ years ago. It's also well-known that 
>> these notions of inflection/finiteness are tricky or nonapplicable in 
>> many so-called polysynthetic languages (e.g. de Reuse 2009).
> It is a recurrent misunderstanding among typologists, chiefly of 
> particularist persuasion, that a grammatical concept should be 
> dispensed with because it is not discrete, covers a continuum, is not 
> applicable to all languages or what not. If one takes this position, 
> then *no**grammatical concept whatsoever can be used in the 
> description of more than one language*. It seems more realistic, and 
> even methodologically more fruitful, to live by concepts whose 
> cross-linguistic application is "tricky".

But there is not necessarily a misunderstanding – some people are fully 
aware, when proposing discrete (non-fuzzy, non-prototype-based) 
definitions of traditional terms (such as "inflection" in my forthcoming 
paper, or "clitic" in another paper: 
https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007071), that *these comparative-concept 
definitions cannot be used for description*.

Different languages have different systems, and their categories are 
defined within these systems. The comparative concepts are defined 
outside of such systems, in substantive terms. One could see them as 
fuzzy or as prototypes, but since comparative concepts are not 
scientific claims anyway (but merely instruments for formulating such 
claims), it seems better to me to formulate them in discrete terms.

Thus, I'd like to have discrete definitions of "mood" and of "finite", 
as comparative concepts. Of course, these will very rarely map 100% onto 
language-particular categories.

Best,

Martin

P.S. I don't know what "particularist persuasion" means. I don't think 
it's controversial that particular languages have particular 
constructions with particular form-classes defined by these constructions.

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
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