Abstract
Many linguists maintain that the grammars of different languages are incommensurable. This poses the problem of how to compare them. One proposed solution is to distinguish between descriptive categories for individual languages and comparative categories for crosslinguistic comparisons. At the same time, it is also commonly assumed that language-internal variation can be described in a unitary manner, thereby presupposing that different dialects of the same language are commensurable. However, it is well known that the language-dialect distinction is not categorical but rather forms a continuum. This raises the question: Where lies the boundary between commensurability and incommensurability? This question is best addressed in terms of the notion of languoid, a cover term that includes languages, smaller entities such as dialects and registers, but also larger assemblages such as genealogical and areal groupings. This article proposes replacing the notion of language-specific descriptive category with that of languoid-associated descriptive category. Since languoids can be of arbitrary size, such categories may form the basis for crosslinguistic comparisons, alongside comparative categories. What this means is that different languoids, regardless of how close or distant they are to each other, may be commensurable with respect to some linguistic features but incommensurable with regard to others.
Acknowledgements
This article presents an elaboration of just one of several points that I made in the recent discussion on the Lingtyp list. I am grateful to Frans Plank for inviting me to contribute this article to the volume, to the participants in the Lingtyp discussion for prompting me to formulate some of the arguments presented here, to Matthew Dryer, Eitan Grossman, and Martin Haspelmath for earlier helpful discussions of some of the issues dealt with in this article, and to Matthew Dryer, Eitan Grossman, Martin Haspelmath, and two anonymous Linguistic Typology reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft.
Abbreviations
- 3
3rd person
- ag
agent-oriented
- anim
animate
- caus
causative
- dem
demonstrative
- dist
distal
- emph
emphatic
- fam
familiar
- foc
focus
- inan
inanimate
- loc
locative
- neg
negation
- pol
polarity
- 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