Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies

In this discussion note, I argue that we need to distinguish carefully between descriptive categories, that is, categories of particular languages, and comparative concepts, which are used for crosslinguistic comparison and are specifically created by typologists for the purposes of comparison. Descriptive formal categories cannot be equated across languages because the criteria for category assignment are different from language to language. This old structuralist insight (called categorial particularism) has recently been emphasized again by several linguists, but the idea that linguists need to identify ‘crosslinguistic categories’ before they can compare languages is still widespread, especially (but not…