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Martin Haspelmath: Scott, you have been spending a lot of time in Northeastern India over the last years, and you are currently working on a description of Bodo, a Trans-Himalayan language of Northeast India. In a few weeks’ time, you will attend the NEILS conference in Kokrajhar (Bodoland Territorial Region, Assam, India). As an experienced fieldworker, how do you see the relationship between language-particular description and typological comparison? Should each language be described in its own terms? Scott DeLancey: Yes, I'm very much in the every-language-in-its-own-terms camp. Of course it's also the case that often looking at a similar phenomenon in other languages will help you understand what you're looking at, but often the enlightenment comes from noticing how your problem is different from all the others.Martin: Interesting – differences are of course the flip side of similarities between languages.Scott: In fact I’m very critical of the practice (sometimes found in grammars of Northeastern Indian languages) of including sections in their grammars for categories imported from English or Hindi that aren't really there in the languages they are describing. Particularly "relative clauses", a function which in almost all Trans-Himalayan languages  (and a number of others, most notoriously Japanese, see Shibatani 2018) is simply a matter of using a nominalization as a nominal modifier.Martin: Yes, there is a constant danger of (perhaps unwittingly) carrying over the categories of familiar languages to less familiar languages, which is something that Franz Boas warned against. But there are also advantages to comparisons with other languages, don’t you think? Isn’t a grammar more transparent that has a section on “relative clauses”?Scott: That's just what most modern grammar-writers do. And it has the advantage that it makes the facts easily accessible to readers whose primary interest is in comparative concepts. My problem with that is that it doesn't follow the structure of the language. Older Tibetanists were often quite explicit that Tibetan, at least, just doesn't have relative clauses, at least "in our (European) sense", as Michael Hahn (1985) put it. The modern practice treats some of the uses of nominalization in a chapter on derivation, and the rest in the section on multi-clausal constructions. What I see is a single, unified construction – a nominalized verb or clause is simply a nominal, which like any other can be an argument of a verb, or a modifier of another nominal. In my mind separating these functions out into different chapters is misrepresenting the language, trying to make it look more Indo-European-like than it is. One might object to that characterization, and say that it's just trying to fit the language into a universal scheme, but in this case, that "universal" scheme is primarily the Indo-European pattern, as there aren't many other languages with classic "relative clauses" with a relative pronoun and movement and all.Martin: Doesn’t it depend on how you use the term “relative clause” – either as a term for a common function that all languages need a strategy for, or as a term for a particular strategy type?Scott: Yes, one way to describe these different approaches is in terms of organization by structure or by function. The Boasian approach is strictly by structure – you inventory the forms and constructions in the language you are describing, and that gives you the organization of the grammar. The modern typological approach, as advocated especially by T. Givón, is that you organize the grammar in terms of (putatively) universal functions. So, all languages seem to have some grammaticalized strategy for restricting the reference of a nominal by invoking another clause one of whose arguments has the same reference. That then is a universal category, or comparative concept. I've advocated and used that approach for a long time, but I'm now starting to think differently.Martin: That’s interesting – my own intellectual trajectory has been similar. In the 1980s and 1990s, I was primarily interested in how similar the languages around the world are despite their superficial differences, but over the last two decades I’ve come to recognize that there are also important language-internal generalizations (of the “emic” type, as emphasized by the structuralists) that one cannot simply ignore.Scott: Of course, as you have said more than once, it is not a matter of one of these approaches being correct and the other wrong – they have different benefits, for different audiences. I'm thinking now that our general practice has swung to far toward the universalist-functional side, and it's time once again to pay more attention to structural differences.Martin: Yes, we should somehow manage to keep in mind both the particular-structural aspects and the universal-functional aspects – I would hope that this can be achieved by recognizing that they both exist but are not identical to each other.Scott: I've always understood, and described, the functionalist program as trying to explain structure as much as possible in terms of function, rather than taking structural categories as ordained by God as the generativists do. (And of course one often can't explain synchronic structures that way, which is why grammaticalization is an essential part of functionalist explanation). But for some – usually not very explicitly, except for Givón – it means replacing the generativist idea of a universal inventory of structures with a universal inventory of functions, which then motivates the idea of describing any particular language in terms of that universal inventory. Taken (too) seriously this leads to things like the idea of treating object fronting as a "word order passive", because like a passive it is used to indicate that the object of the clause is more topical than the subject.Martin: Yes, this is a weird use of the term “passive”, but it’s true that in Givón’s thinking, this is quite consistent. It seems that he is simply not very interested in thinking about language-particular description (though his 2011 Ute grammar is excellent, so he does not always practice what he preaches).Scott: There’s no real contradiction there. No one is going to try to write a descriptive grammar hewing rigidly to one or the other party line – even if they preach a party line in other contexts. That would be not just silly, but impossible. (Which is why there aren’t many descriptive grammars written in a generative framework). And you always have to keep your intended audience in mind, and Givón’s intended audience explicitly includes the Ute community, who supported his work for years, and whose interest I can assure you is primarily in Ute-specific particulars, not in how their language will contribute to the field of linguistic typology. (This is a point, by the way, that all grammar-writers in the 21st century need to keep in mind). But I imagine that some of the resistance to your advocacy of a Boasian approach is rooted in the idea that if you start from any kind universalist-functional position, explicitly or otherwise, then to present a description which is not organized by function is to neglect one's responsibility to contribute to general linguistics.Martin: I recently reread Christian Lehmann’s 1989 paper on the relationship between general comparative grammar and language description, and he expressed it quite well back then: We need both perspectives, the (universalist) function-to-form perspective, and the (particularist) form-to-function perspective. They should somehow be present simultaneously in a descriptive grammar. – In any event, thank you very much for this conversation, Scott!ReferencesGivón, T. 2011. Ute reference grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Hahn, Michael. 1985. Lehrbuch der Klassischen Tibetischen Schriftsprache. Bonn: Indica und Tibetica Verlag.Lehmann, Christian. 1989. Language description and general comparative grammar. In Graustein, Gottfried &#38; Leitner, Gerhard (eds.), Reference grammars and modern linguistic theory (Linguistische Arbeiten 226), 133–162. Tübingen: Niemeyer. (http://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/lg_descr.pdf)Shibatani, Masayoshi. 2018. Nominalization in crosslinguistic perspective. In Prashant Pardeshi &#38; Taro Kageyama (eds.), Handbook of Japanese Contrastive Linguistics, 345-510. Berlin: de Gruyter.