LINGUIST List 5.1254

Tue 08 Nov 1994

Disc: Typological classification

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1. Martin Haspelmath, typological classification

A few remarks on Fritz Newmeyer's posting on classification in language
typology:

Of course it is not always easy to decide to which type a given language
should be assigned, since there may be conflicting criteria. But some
people seem to think that this is somehow a deep problem with language
typology. In reality, there is no deep problem here at all, so the
typological literature is quite right in not dwelling on such trivial
methodological points too much, concentrating on substantive
and theoretical issues instead.
 True, the methodology of language typology is somewhat different from
the methodology used in single-language studies that most linguists
engange in. When searching for significant correlations between
features/parameters in the world's language, one has to classify
languages, and the more languages one looks at, the less energy one can
spend on resolving each individual case. Clearly, the speacialist will
sometimes disagree with the way her or his language was assigned, but
then most of them time not all specialists agree on the right
classification themselves. When the criteria are in conflict, it may
sometimes be necessary to give more weight to some than to others in a
somewhat arbitrary way--but this is simply one reflection of the necessary
idealization that accompanies any serious scientific endeavor.
 It's as simple as that: The more one studies linguistic phenomena in
breadth, the more one loses in depth. But vice versa, linguists that
study only one or a few languages are working on an extremely narrow
basis and lose in breadth what they gain in depth.
 Ideally, typological research should be conducted by teams of
linguists, much in the same way as research in big science is organized.
With more resources that are combined, one could study linguistic
phenomena in considerable breadth and depth simultaneously.
An attempt to follow this strategy has been made in the European Science
Programme in Language Typology, which has been running in Europe for the
past five years (wait for 10 volumes on the typology of European
languages, to appear with Mouton de Gruyter in a year's time). This was
only a very modest, seriously underfunded attempt, but until we attract
really big research money or manage to agree on more things, we have to
be happy that we have colleagues like Johanna Nichols who are willing to
make enormous efforts to get a view of linguistic phenomena on a global
scale.

Martin Haspelmath (Free University of Berlin)