Fifty shades of grue: Indeterminate categories and induction in and out of the language sciences

Abstract

It is hard to define structural categories of language (e.g. noun, verb, adjective) in a way which accounts for linguistic variation. This leads Haspelmath to make the following claims: i) unlike in biology and chemistry, there are no natural kinds in language; ii) there is a fundamental distinction between descriptive and comparative linguistic categories, and; iii) generalisations based on comparisons between languages can in principle tell us nothing about specific languages. The implication is that cross-linguistic categories cannot support scientific induction. I disagree: generalisations on the basis of linguistic comparison should inform the language sciences. Haspelmath is not alone in identifying a connection between the nature of the categories we use and the kind of inferences we can make (e.g. Goodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’), but he is both overly pessimistic about categories in language and overly optimistic about categories in other sciences: biology and even chemistry work with categories which are indeterminate to some degree. Linguistic categories are clusters of co-occurring properties with variable instantiations, but this does not mean that we should dispense with them: if linguistic generalisations reliably lead to predictions about individual languages, and if we can integrate them into more sophisticated causal explanations, then there is no a priori requirement for a fundamental descriptive/comparative distinction. Instead, we should appreciate linguistic variation as a key component of our explanations rather than a problem to be dealt with.

Mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages: typology, ecology and ideology

“…Specifically, in early sign linguistics research in the 1960s and 70s, the languages that were being studied were ASL, and European sign languages like Langue des Signes Française (LSF, French Sign Language), DGS, BSL, STS, and Dansk tegnsprog (DTS, Danish Sign Language) (Perniss, Pfau & Steinbach 2007;Pfau 2012). The development of categories and how they are used in a field is directly related to the order in which languages and phenomena have been studied (Lewin 1994;Spike 2020). This can be seen in the study of creoles.…”

The Agreement Hierarchy and (generalized) semantic agreement

“…We examine and justify the underpinnings of a proposed typology, and relate them to the underlying attributes of the domain (Round & Corbett 2020). In doing so, we take on board advances in related typological disciplines, demonstrating that linguistics is normal (social) science (Spike 2020, Himmelmann 2022). Since doubts were first expressed about the nature of semantic agreement, it has taken many years to offer a way forward: new data, some "less semantic" than semantic agreement, and some "more semantic", have been key.…”

Why Does Language Complexity Resist Measurement?

“…In the best of circumstances, the grammatical accounts being used will have been drawn up after investigation of whether the categories are actually the same across the languages, and not assumed to be the same because of partial overlap and use of the same English grammatical category (or whatever language the analysis is written in) to translate them. This is not always the case, and some of the serious consequences are laid out by Haspelmath (2018) (for an alternative perspective, see Spike, 2020). Most of the principal analytical categories that linguists make use of, starting with noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, sentence, case, tense, mood, number, person, voice, conjunction, subordination, originated in the analysis of Latin, and the question is whether they can be applied to any language, barring compelling evidence to the contrary in specific cases.…”