1 Descriptive hypothesis-testing is distinct from comparative hypothesis-testing: A reply to Davis, Gillon and Matthewson MARTIN HASPELMATH Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology 1. Introduction I fully agree with Davis, Gillon and Matthewson’s target article (henceforth DGM) on some of the key points of their paper: (i) that sophisticated first-hand work on small languages should be a priority for contemporary linguistics, (ii) that hypothesis-driven elicitation is a very important technique of descriptive (= language-specific) linguistics, (iii) that many regularities of language are difficult to discover on the basis of small or moderate-size corpora, and (iv) that comparative linguistics is not linked to a particular (meta)theoretical approach, and that generative linguists have made very important contributions to this field. So where is the controversy? I think that the main problem is that DGM have not framed the divisions in our field (as highlighted by Levionson & Evans 2010) in the right way. It is not hard to see that linguists who work on linguistic diversity tend to fall into two very rough sociological groups: Those who are more likely to attend conferences like the Association for Linguistic Typology and publish in journals like Linguistic Discovery, and those who are more likely to attend West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics and publish in NLLT. But what kind of intellectual difference, if any, corresponds to this grouping? My feeling is that the intellectual difference between the two sociological groups is not well understood in our field, and that many linguists who tend to hang out in one of the groups more than in the other are perhaps not committed to a particular intellectual orientation. This may be particularly so with linguists who work in depth on a few small, little-studied 1 languages. In previous work (Haspelmath 2014), I have argued that the most interesting intellectual difference is between linguists who are committed to an aprioristic approach (working with cross-linguistic categories that are given in advance by the restrictive framework), and linguists who have no such commitment and are open to discovering completely new categories, and who are also open to diverse ways of explaining the generalizations they find. It seems to me that to a large extent, DGM's work (and the other work they report) falls into this latter category. However, they adopt one key idea from the aprioristic approach: that descriptive hypothesis-testing is the same as comparative hypothesis-testing. I will discuss this assumption in §2 and argue that descriptive hypothesis-testing is very different from comparative hypothesis-testing. 1 DGM use the term "minority language", but I prefer small language (or little-studied language, where this means that not more than a dozen linguists have done serious work on them), because many "minority languages" are quite large, and in some countries like India or Nigeria it is not clear that there are any "majority languages".