Abstract
What are comparative concepts and how are they related to language-specific categories used in language description? Three general categories of comparative concepts are defined here: purely functional comparative concepts and two types of hybrid formal-functional concepts, constructions and strategies. The two hybrid types provide more explicit and precise definitions of common typological practice. However a terminological issue is that Western grammatical terms are frequently used to describe strategies which are not universal rather than constructions which are. Language-specific categories appear to be radically different from comparative concepts because the former are defined distributionally whereas the latter are defined in universal functional and formal terms. But language-specific constructions have functions, that is, they are instances of constructions in the comparative sense and their form is an instantiation of a strategy. Typology forms generalizations across language-specific constructions in both their form and their function. Finally, a major issue is the confusion of terminological choices for language-specific categories. Four rules of thumb for useful labeling of language-specific categories, largely following best descriptive practice, are offered.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Lexical flexibility in Oceanic languages
- Sampling for variety
- Discussion
- Of categories: Language-particular – comparative – universal
- The challenge of making language description and comparison mutually beneficial
- Crosslinguistic categories, comparative concepts, and the Walman diminutive
- Crosslinguistic categories in morphosyntactic typology: Problems and prospects
- On categorization: Stick to the facts of the languages
- Comparative concepts and language-specific categories: Theory and practice
- Some language-particular terms are comparative concepts
- On the right of being a comparative concept
- On linguistic categories
- Thoughts on language-specific and crosslinguistic entities
- Describing languoids: When incommensurability meets the language-dialect continuum
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Lexical flexibility in Oceanic languages
- Sampling for variety
- Discussion
- Of categories: Language-particular – comparative – universal
- The challenge of making language description and comparison mutually beneficial
- Crosslinguistic categories, comparative concepts, and the Walman diminutive
- Crosslinguistic categories in morphosyntactic typology: Problems and prospects
- On categorization: Stick to the facts of the languages
- Comparative concepts and language-specific categories: Theory and practice
- Some language-particular terms are comparative concepts
- On the right of being a comparative concept
- On linguistic categories
- Thoughts on language-specific and crosslinguistic entities
- Describing languoids: When incommensurability meets the language-dialect continuum