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Martin: Many thanks, Gillian, for contributing a substantive comment on a recent blogpost about describing and comparing languages and framework-free theory. Instead of leaving your comment simply as it, here are some reactions of mine in a dialogue form (and thanks for adding a few more points, marked in italics below).Gillian Ramchand: It seems logically obvious that IF there are things common to all languages, then every individual language will manifest them in some way. Can we agree on this first obvious point?Martin Haspelmath: I’m not sure what exactly you have in mind, but it seems to me that this is not necessary. I think that implicational universals may be seen as properties of Human Language, but they may be irrelevant to many languages where the protasis does not hold (e.g. the implication that if a language makes a gender distinction in the first person, it also makes it in the third person looks like a deep regularity, but it is manifested only in languages with gender). So I don’t see g-linguistic regularities very closely connected to p-linguistic regularities.Gillian: Fine. But I did not say that everything should be manifested, only that the manifestation has to be rooted both in what is necessary and what is possible, by definition.  To be sure, in the absence of a deep understanding of all possible human languages simultaneously, it is rather difficult to know, when looking at that one language, which aspects are necessary and which contingent. The real question is the right way to proceed. Looking shallowly at many languages can often miss the internal organic genius of the individual exemplars.Martin: I’m absolutely with you there! At least since Sapir’s time, fieldworkers have been emphasizing this. I think it was Sapir who first talked about the “genius” of a language, and around the same time in Europe, Mathesius talked about “characterological” study of individual languages.Gillian: Every time I have seen broad swathe typological work on a language I happen to know rather well, I find even the crudest descriptive facts startlingly wrong. So, second and obvious point that I think we can all agree on is that we need many different linguists working on achieving deep understanding of many different languages from different language families.Martin: Yes, of course. But we need to make sure that we don’t confuse comparison (a kind of g-linguistics) with p-linguistic description. For example, I have often heard people say that Matthew Dryer is wrong to say (in his WALS chapter on clause-level word order) that German and Dutch don’t have SOV order, but by his criteria, they don’t. He is applying special comparative concepts, and not trying to describe these languages in the most appropriate terms. There is no conflict with a description of German in terms of verb movement to second position and Dryer’s classification. The two are simply different views on the same facts.Gillian: Now comes the tricky part. What methodology do the individual linguistic researchers apply to their study of their languages? Do they (i) take categories from received wisdom, collected abstractions from many other languages, linguists and theoretical frameworks, or do they (ii) try to find them emergent from the data? Can we not agree that in practice, all working linguists use a combination of the two? Doing the first thing is a crude caricature, in practice good linguists avoid this, but everyone is human and we all know it is hard to see outside our own unexamined assumptions at time.Martin: I think that many linguists are quite explicit in that they strive to describe a language in terms of universal and innate categories that were hypothesized to be part of UG on the basis of completely different languages. For example, the idea that Chinese makes a finite/non-finite distinction wouldn’t have occurred to linguists if they hadn’t seen European languages and if they hadn’t hypothesized that some categories of European languages such as (non)finiteness are part of universal grammar. So I don’t think that all linguists want to avoid “taking categories from received wisdom” – in fact, many people see this as their central goal.Gillian: I would say that the second strategy (finding categories emergent in the data) is also an unrealistic caricature. This is because categories cannot in fact be constructed purely inductively, but in a constant dialectic with hypothesis formation. Hypothesis formation in turn is informed by the linguists own expectations (formed via combination of experience and theoretical intuition).Martin: Yes, I fully agree that one needs to set up hypotheses and test them, and of course, the kinds of hypotheses one tests are informed by experience and intuition.Gillian: It is simply a mistake to think that it is possible to proceed purely inductively to create the individual p-grammars. Also, it may be a methodological mistake to attempt to do so. As an experienced linguist/fieldworker one has a lot of implicit expert knowledge and this informs hypothesis formation. If p-grammars were constructable purely by induction, we could let computers do it for us.Martin: Here I disagree. I don’t know what computers can do, but I think that we can create grammars “purely inductively”, in the sense that we don’t need the model of any other language, at least in principle. Of course, such models help in practice, because languages are so similar in so many ways. But languages are also sometimes idiosyncratic, and in such cases, the models of other languages (or even more general g-linguistic frameworks) do not help. Take German strong and weak adjective declension. This causes non-native learners a lot of trouble, because it is so idiosyncratic and senseless. To state the generalizations correctly, one needs German-specific categories like “Definite Determiner” and “Indefinitie/Possessive Determiner”. There is no general framework that helps here. Languages are full of such idiosyncrasies, but many linguists wrongly try to subsume them under more general regularities, because they have the expectation that all grammars of all languages must be based on the same UG categories.Gillian: I think it is simply a caricature (there’s that word again) of generative linguists’ methods to say that we import analyses wholesale from English. Here's an example that _I_ think is interesting. The GB (Government-Binding) framework in the 1980s (Chomsky 1981) proposed the category of INFL as the label for the functional position that every assertable main clause seemed to require, later decomposed by Pollock (1989) into T and Agr. This was widely accepted at the time, and although Agr has now fallen out of favour as an independent functional head, T has remained.  In the 2000s however, cue Ritter &#38; Wiltschko (2014), who noticed, looking at Salishan languages and then at Blackfoot, that the obligatory category necessary to make an assertable main clause is not temporal but locational in the case of Salishan, and person in the case of Blackfoot (an Algonquian language). They then made the proposal that what was important in all of these languages was a piece of functional information connecting the event description to context (by which I mean the narrow Kaplanian context, c, consisting of the speaker, hearer, time, location and world of the current utterance). Their proposal was to rethink the category T as a more abstract category (which for historical reasons one could actually return to calling INFL if one chose), which performs an anchoring function. I found it an exciting proposal and one which now leads me to look in a different way at languages without tense inflection to see if there is anything else there that we might be missing.  I do think that it is possible for anchoring information to be pragmatically negotiated, instead of explicitly represented in the grammar, but it does seem to be a necessary semantic ingredient that is required for purposes of inference in actual communication.  So, it is possible in my notation/implementation for INFL to be contextually negotiated, but it is also possible for it to be negotiated by non-temporal contextual information.  This is an example of where work on non-Indo-European languages successfully achieved a modification of the theoretical framework in a rather deep and enlightening way. I expect that kind of experience in my field, and I do not think that being a “minimalist”  syn-sem person makes those kinds of things impossible.  Quite the contrary, in the case of Ritter &#38; Wiltschko, being specific about what they expected and not finding it didn't just lead them to abandon the model and write a p-grammar for what they saw – they managed to see a higher level abstract pattern which I personally find quite insightful.   Martin: Maybe the importation was not “wholesale”, but certainly many ideas that were based on English were then applied to other languages, like finiteness to Chinese, or DP (i.e. determiners) to Russian. It may also happen the other way round, with an “applicative” notion imported from Bantu and applied to English. In all these cases, descriptions that focus on the “genius” of each particular language would be simpler, but generative linguists have typically not even considered such p-linguistic solutions. (Ritter &#38; Wiltschko may not have framed their innovation in p-linguistic terms, but their proposals didn’t have much of an effect on the field of generative g-linguistics, and it’s not clear to me if it is more than simply a weakening of the general theory.)Gillian: The guiding principles we are assuming are common are in fact extremely abstract – like for example, we are always looking for sensitivity to hierarchy, and we have an expectation that pronominal systems will be sensitive to participant vs. non-participant in the act of speaking. No linguist I know has a particular g-grammar in their head, since we do not know yet what the most general human language principles are. In my opinion it is a category mistake – g-level things are a completely different level of abstraction. Conversely, nearly every linguist I know who is trying to come up with p-grammars for particular languages is doing some combination of g-grammar study and p-grammar study, because all p-grammars are particular embodiments of whatever it is sits at the g-level.Martin: Yes, as you say: “We do not know yet what the most general human language principles are” – this is why I find it so surprising (and disturbing) that many linguists think that they should teach the latest MGG ideas to students, as if they were somehow an established achievement that one can build on. So what MGG syntacticians do is to put a particular idea of g-grammar into students’ heads, and the students then find it difficult to think in more straightforward terms about the languages they study (apart from the fact that they realize that this would not be prestigious). Many younger-generation linguists seem to think that the MGG notation is merely a descriptive tool (as I noted earlier), whereas in fact it makes sense to use this highly specific metalanguage only if one claims that it is innate.Gillian: Again, I don't think the things we carry over to our understanding of a new language are as low-level and specific as you seem to think. And the minimalist tool box is much more open-ended and usable for many more different things than you seem to assume. It is also a much more heterodox theory, encompassing many more different views on what level of thing might be innate, than you seem to assume.Martin: Yes, I realize that there are many different views among a group of people who look rather monolithic to outsiders because of their use of a certain notation and jargon that comes from Chomsky's technical proposals (“vP”, “feature checking” etc.). You described this in an interesting way in your post “On being a generative linguist”.Gillian: So are our disagreements substantive? Methodological? Or crudely ideological?Martin: I think they are primarily methodological, because generative linguists think that they can use any kind of diagnostic to argue for any kind of category. For example, at the DGfS conference in Bremen earlier this year, Martin Salzmann and Benjamin Bruening both gave talks on the DP vs. NP issue (I mentioned this in an earlier post), but they applied very different diagnostics for different languages. A still different sort of diagnostic was chosen by David Erschler in his recent paper on Ossetic (mentioned earlier here). I think all of these arguments make sense (as long as one realizes that the categories one works with are innate), but they don’t seem to be resolvable with our current means, because there are too many possibilities. That’s why I recommended the more robust framework-free approach in my 2010 paper, which provides much simpler p-linguistic descriptions, making descriptions independent of possible further explanations (including perhaps in terms if innateness).Gillian: In terms of methodology, I would not dream of trying to build an analysis of Norwegian adjectival definiteness inflection along the model of German. There are tons of distributional patterns and natural classes found uniquely in different languages. I am using my knowledge of highly abstract commonalities I see to guide me in hypothesis formation, and I try to express the particular in terms of the general, so that other linguists can follow the description up one level if they choose. One thing is sure: If everyone invents their own labels there is no hope down the line for comparison or commensurability of primes. So I like to know what people mean when they use a term. This means I have to belong to a framework, even if it is in some ways a moving target. So yes, I choose to teach my students a certain toolbox, but I also tell them to question everything.In addition, I make them read everything in other frameworks in the empirical areas they are working on. My impression of certain people who style themselves as non-Chomskians is that they read philosophy of linguistics, but don't actually read very many actual linguists working on stuff in my field. Some of it is rubbish theory-internal jargon, and other stuff is really quite excellent. Just the same as any other theory in fact.  I think you overstate the innateness thing. Nothing I actually do in practice would change if I discovered tomorrow that everything that all languages have in common is highly abstract, cognitive and not specific to language.Martin: Many thanks, Gillian, for this interesting converstion!ReferencesChomsky, Noam A. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. Framework-free grammatical theory. In Bernd Heine &#38; Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 341–365. Oxforf: Oxford University Press.Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20(3). 365–424.Ritter, Elizabeth &#38; Martina Wiltschko. 2014. The composition of INFL. Natural Language &#38; Linguistic Theory 32(4). 1331–1386. doi:10.1007/s11049-014-9248-6.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;