[Lingtyp] contrast between [ɪ] and [e]

[Christian Lehmann]

Thanks for this discussion. Some discussants emphasize that the data 
linguists are faced with display variation and arbitrariness at all 
'lectal' levels while others insist on the search for underlying 
principles that reduce the freedom. One might say that that is a moot 
ideological dispute because both parties have a point. It seems clear 
that the proponents of systematicity can hope to advance our knowledge 
of language only if the principles (rules, laws) that they establish 
take the existent variation into account. It should be equally clear 
that the search for systematicity in the object area is precisely the 
task of empirical science. The unbiased representation of the data and 
the orderly description of their distribution is a presupposition, but 
it is not the goal of science. The goal is to reduce this description to 
the most simple and general form possible.

This brings me back to the dispute - which has popped up on this list 
more than once - over the role of comparative concepts. They are 
necessary in typology. Typological assessments and generalizations are 
couched in terms of comparative concepts like 'seven-vowel system vs. 
five-vowel system'. To say that such concepts have no 'lect-independent' 
status is dodging the issue. Concepts such as [ɪ] and [e] have a 
general, language independent status. Otherwise what generations of 
typologists have said about them would be gibberish. And of course, they 
are not defined in terms of acoustic features. They are defined by 
combining a prototype (as Daniel Jones once did for vowels) with what E. 
Keenan once called 'behavioral properties' like being able to make a 
contrast in minimal pairs, getting neutralized together with a 
neighboring phone in certain contexts and so forth. The same goes, 
needless to say, for concepts at other levels of the language system 
like 'passive' and 'antipassive', 'ergative vs. accusative structure', 
'agglutinative vs. isolating morphology' (this is just being used in the 
simultaneous discussion on glossing) and so forth.

And such concepts are relative in the sense that they are not put up in 
isolation but in the context of a system of other concepts. Thus, the 
definition of an [ɪ] is accompanied by a definition of [e], the 
definition of a passive construction goes together with (at least) the 
definition of an active construction, and so forth. The simultaneous 
definition of neighboring concepts renders it possible to apply them 
despite their prototypical nature.

Such definitions regulate the use of comparative concepts in language 
description and comparison. They regulate whether a particular phone in 
a language will be called [ɪ] or rather [e]. If one took an agnostic 
position concerning the validity of one rather than another concept in 
the categorization of a given phenomenon, one would render typological 
work and, ultimately, generalizations about human language impossible. 
That is, one would deny linguistics the status of a science.

We are not talking about whether linguistics is a science in the same 
sense as chemistry is. Nor are we talking about whether all those 
comparative concepts that linguists have been using over the past two 
centuries have been defined well or always been used responsibly. We are 
talking about the necessity and possibility of defining and using 
comparative concepts in linguistic work.


-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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