Abstract
We provide a critical review of the distinction between “comparative concepts” and “descriptive categories”, showing that in current typological practice the former are usually dependent on the latter and are often vague, being organized around prototypes rather than having sharp boundaries. We also propose a classification of comparative concepts, arguing that their definitions can be based on similarities between languages or on differences between languages or can also be “blind” to language-particular facts. We conclude that, first, comparative concepts and descriptive categories are ontologically not as distinct as some typologists would like to have it, and, second, that attempts at a “non-aprioristic” approach to linguistic description and language typology are more of an illusion than reality or even a desideratum.
Acknowledgements
We thank Michael Betsch, Anna Dybo, Maxim Fedotov, Dmitry Gerasimov, Martin Haspelmath, Maria Kholodilova, Tetiana Liubchenko, Tanja Mortelmans, Sorin Paliga, Benjamin Saade, Hedwig Skirgård, Nathan W. Hill, and Fernando Zúñiga for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Frans Plank for encouragement to write it. None of these colleagues is responsible for the views expressed here. This material is partly based upon work supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant No. 14-18-03270.
Abbreviations
- 3
3rd person
- abs
absolutive
- ben
benefactive
- caus
causative
- dir
directive
- dyn
dynamicity
- erg
ergative
- io
indirect object
- loc
locative applicative
- obl
oblique
- pl
plural
- poss
possessive
- pst
past
- rel
relative
- sg
singular.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
Articles in the same Issue
- 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