[Lingtyp] Areal and phylogenetic researcher biases

Sat Sep 28 19:50:25 UTC 2024

Hi Juergen,

I think this is often associated with choice of terminology, which might
facilitate a quantitative study, by comparing terminology used in
descriptions to distributions of features based on (consistently applied)
comparative concepts. I'll be presenting something related to this at ALT
this year ("The effects of terminological variation for large-scale
typology"). For now I will summarize three examples as case studies based
on my dissertation research (Ross 2021a). As with Jeremy's comment I don't
have statistics directly addressing your question, and terminology is not
an exact way to measure what you're asking about, but I think it's possible
to make some relevant quantitative observations this way, and this issue
does seem to be one of concern for objective typology in general.

1. Associated Motion (Guillaume & Koch 2021; Ross 2021a, 2021b)
Until recently there was no widely known term for this phenomenon.
"Associated motion" comes from descriptions of Australian languages in the
1980s and has been used elsewhere only within the past couple decades. Most
descriptions follow regional traditions for terminological choices (Ross
2021b:32), and there is also often no explicit distinction (at least with
regard to the terminology itself) between associated motion and
directionals. Itive/andative and ventive/venitive are common for Africa, or
centrifugal and centripetal for Chadic specifically, and translocative and
cislocative (and sometimes dislocatives) for North American languages, for
example. Other terms, especially just "directionals" are often used
elsewhere. Interestingly the term "aspect" is sometimes used as well to
include this type of verbal morphology even though it's not temporal,
apparently just as a "closest" familiar label. Familiarity with these
regional descriptive traditions also probably has an impact on whether
researchers expect to find these features, in addition to how they label
them. On the other hand, I believe that the variation in terminology has
also impeded broader awareness of associated motion as a cross-linguistic
phenomenon because it was not obvious that "directionals" or "itives" or
"centripetals" or "translocatives" here and there were actually referring
to the same thing, so researchers (field workers as well as typologists)
weren't aware of something to document and compare.

2. Serial Verb Constructions (Ross 2021a)
Definitions of SVCs are notoriously inconsistent, to the point that it
isn't rare for authors of descriptive grammars or other papers to be
explicitly hesitant to use the term for a new language, while others use
the term loosely for related but distinct phenomena, and some authors have
even questioned whether there is such as thing as SVCs at all (e.g.
Delplanque 1998; Paul 2008). Usage of the term spread from West Africa to
several other groups of languages (especially Southeast Asia, as well as
for creoles and pidgins), but is not widely used in some other places such
as North America. For this reason it is common for grammars of West African
languages, for example, to explicitly discuss SVCs, including sometimes
extending the term to other similar constructions, or to report that the
language lacks SVCs. But in North America, although some recent research
has shown some languages feature SVCs, the topic is rarely discussed, and
some researchers are hesitant to apply the label. See for example Nakayama
(2001:115) and Davidson (2002:152, 352) on Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka; North
America). Or similarly Besnier (2000:538) didn't "unequivocally" identify
any SVCs in part due to the expectation that Polynesian languages (vs. the
rest of Oceanic) typically lack SVCs (with some purported exceptions). The
point is not whether these constructions are "really" SVCs but that authors
are hesitant due to descriptive traditions and familiarity with tendencies
in related and/or regional languages. Another example from my ongoing
research is that SVCs appear to be extremely common in sign languages (even
more than in pidgins and creoles, for example), but they are discussed
relatively little in descriptive work (though recently have been mentioned
more and more), given other more traditional topics of focus for research
on sign languages. The inverse applies as well, where terms are borrowed
from one neighboring language to another even if it's not an exact match
(e.g. "SVCs" in Supyire, Niger-Congo, West Africa, despite there being a
"serial verb connective" linking element between the verbs which Carlson
1994:289 recognizes as not being "prototypical" for SVCs). (Overuse and
underuse of the term SVCs is not limited to particular groups of languages,
of course; cf. Ross 2021a, 2022).

3. Switch-Reference (Ross 2021a)
Switch-reference has a more strongly regional distribution than SVCs, with
regions for previous research and worldwide distribution being closely
associated (especially North America, Papua New Guinea, Australia and to
some degree South America). Researchers working on languages of these areas
typically expect to find this feature, and researchers elsewhere may not
address the topic. This is often accurate given the regional distribution.
However, cases have been reported elsewhere such as in part of
north/eastern Eurasia (Nichols 1983; Nedjalkov 1998; Hock 2014), and this
has had relatively little impact on studies of switch-reference in general.
Similarly, so-called "echo subject" constructions in South Vanuatu
languages resemble switch-reference but have been mostly rejected by
scholars of switch-reference (e.g. de Sousa 2016). Although some of these
cases may be marginal, similarly marginal instances would often be labeled
as "switch-reference" in regions where the feature is typical. So again it
isn't about which is "really" switch-reference or not, but inclinations of
researchers working on different groups of languages.

I will discuss the issue of variation in terminology, including what I
believe is an impact on Grambank entries, in my ALT talk this year.

References
Besnier, Niko. 2000. Tuvaluan, a Polynesian Language of the Central
Pacific. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203027127
Carlson, Robert. 1994. A grammar of Supyire. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110883053
Davidson, Matthew. 2002. Studies in Southern Wakashan (Nootkan) Grammar.
State University of New York at Buffalo Ph.D. dissertation.
de Sousa, Hilário. 2016. Some non-canonical switch reference systems and
the fundamental functions of switch reference. In Rik van Gijn & Jeremy
Hammond (eds.), Switch Reference 2.0, 55–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.114.02des
Delplanque, Alain. 1998. Le mythe des “séries verbales.” Faits de langues
6(11). 231–250. https://doi.org/10.3406/flang.1998.1212
Guillaume, Antoine & Harold Koch (eds.). 2021. Associated Motion. Berlin:
De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692099
Hock, Hans Henrich. 2014. Switch reference in South Asian languages.
Presented at South Asian Language Analysis Roundtable (SALA) 30, University
of Hyderabad, February 6, 2014.
Nakayama, Toshihide. 2001. Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) morphosyntax. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Nichols, Johanna. 1983. Switch-Reference in the Northeast Caucasus. In John
Haiman & Pamela Munro (eds.), Switch Reference and Universal Grammar:
Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar,
Winnipeg, May 1981, 245–265. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.2.14nic
Nedjalkov, Igor V. 1998. Converbs in the languages of Eastern Siberia.
Language Sciences 20(3). 339–351.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(98)00008-4
Paul, Waltraud. 2008. The serial verb construction in Chinese: A tenacious
myth and a Gordian knot. The Linguistic Review 25(3–4). 367–411.
https://doi.org/10.1515/TLIR.2008.011
Ross, Daniel. 2021. Pseudocoordination, Serial Verb Constructions and
Multi-Verb Predicates: The relationship between form and structure.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. dissertation.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5546425
Ross, Daniel. 2021b. A cross-linguistic survey of Associated Motion and
Directionals. In Antoine Guillaume & Harold Koch (eds.), Associated Motion,
31–86. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692099-002
Ross, Daniel. 2022. Pseudocoordination and Serial Verb Constructions as
Multi-Verb Predicates. In Giuliana Giusti, Vincenzo Nicolò Di Caro & Daniel
Ross (eds.), Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions,
315–335. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.274.14ros

Daniel Ross
ALT webmaster
University of California, Riverside

On Sat, Sep 28, 2024 at 11:45 AM Jeremy Bradley via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> This doesn't really touch upon any guesstimates / numbers, but it strongly
> reminds me of the bias there esp. historically was in the description of
> differential object marking in Finnic languages (e.g. Finnish: *hän jo-i
> maido-n* s/he drink-PST.3SG milk-ACC 's/he drank the milk' ~ *hän jo-i
> maito-a* s/he drink-PST.3SG milk-PART 's/he drank (some) milk') before
> that was a salient analysis dimension. "This is clearly just a way to
> express definiteness", say scholars whose frame of reference is Germanic
> languages. "No, this is clearly just how verbal aspect is expressed in
> these languages", say scholars whose frame of reference is Slavic
> languages. I never encountered Hungarian scholars presenting a third
> option, that it's clearly just how Finnish verbalizes the difference
> between subjective and objective conjugation, but it would not shock me if
> that has happened too!
>
> Best,
> Jeremy
> On 28/09/2024 20:17, Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp wrote:
>
> Dear all – I’m wondering whether anybody has attempted to estimate the
> size of the following putative effect on descriptive and typological
> research:
>
>
>
> Suppose there is a particular phenomenon in Language L, the known
> properties of which are equally compatible with an analysis in terms of
> construction types (comparative concepts) A and B.
>
>
>
> Suppose furthermore that L belongs to a language family and/or linguistic
> area such that A has much more commonly been invoked in descriptions of
> languages of that family/area than B.
>
>
>
> Then to the extent that a researcher attempting to adjudicate between A
> and B wrt. L (whether in a description of L, in a typological study, or in
> coding for an evolving typological database) is aware of the prevalence of
> A-coding/analyses for languages of the family/area in question, that might
> make them more likely to code/analyze L as exhibiting A as well.
>
>
>
> So for example, a researcher who assumes languages of the family/area of L
> to be typically tenseless may be influenced by this assumption and as a
> result become (however slightly) more likely to treat L as tenseless as
> well. In contrast, if she assumes languages of the family/area of L to be
> typically tensed, that might make her ever so slightly more likely to
> analyze L also as tensed.
>
>
>
> It seems to me that this is a cognitive bias related to, and possibly a
> case of, essentialism. (And just as in the case of (other forms of)
> essentialism, the actual cognitive causes/mechanisms of the bias may vary.)
>
>
>
> But regardless, my question is, again, has anybody tried to guestimate to
> what extent the results of current typological studies may be warped by
> this kind of researcher bias? (Note that the bias may be affecting both
> authors of descriptive work and typologists using descriptive work as data,
> so there is a possible double-whammy effect.)
>
>
>
> Thanks! – Juergen
>
>
>
>
>
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
> Phone: (716) 645 0127
> Fax: (716) 645 3825
> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu
> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>
> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585
> 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
>
> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
> (Leonard Cohen)
>
> --
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing listLingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orghttps://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
> --
> Jeremy Bradley, Ph.D.
> University of Vienna
> http://www.mari-language.comjeremy.moss.bradley@univie.ac.at
>
> Office address:
> Institut EVSL
> Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
> Universität Wien
> Campus AAKH, Hof 7-2
> Spitalgasse 2-4
> 1090 Wien
> AUSTRIA
>
> Mobile: +43-664-99-31-788
> Skype: jeremy.moss.bradley
>
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[Lingtyp] Areal and phylogenetic *researcher* biases

[Lingtyp] Areal and phylogenetic researcher biases