An inflection/derivation distinction on the other side of the globe?

There is a tradition of dividing all of (non-compounding) morphology into inflection and derivation in European languages, and like other European traditions, this one has been carried over to languages around the world. But on what basis?

There are clear cases of inflection and derivation where nobody would argue Continue reading

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The costs of ignoring language change

Quite a few people have already responded to Keith Chen’s paper, but as far as I can see, none have highlighted a rather glaring problem with Chen’s claims: Chen completely ignores the hard-won insights about language structure that have emerged from research on language change, especially grammaticalization studies.

If I understand Chen right, he’s arguing for a direct, causal (‘Whorfian’) link between language structure and ‘habitual behavior.’ As he writes, ‘my findings are largely consistent with the hypothesis that languages with obligatory future-time reference lead their speakers to engage in less future-oriented behavior.’ Continue reading

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Stuck in the futureless zone

The Yale economist Keith Chen has made quite a stir by his claim that there is a connection between grammatical marking of the future and future-related behavior: in short, that speakers of languages which mark the future save less and care less about their health. The purported explanation is that obligatory marking will make the future seem more distant and thus less important to care about. A paper on the topic, forthcoming in American Economic Review, is available from his homepage; in addition, there is a TED talk and numerous media reactions which can easily be found by googling.

This touches me personally since the linguistics that Chen bases himself on is to a significant extent taken from my own work and that of the EUROTYP Tense and Aspect group that I led in the nineties (Dahl 2000a). Continue reading

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You can win a prize by proving that creoles are NOT a distinct group of languages

Martin Haspelmath posted a blog text a few days ago in which he mentioned the interesting question whether one can define creoles on structural grounds, independently of what we know about social factors. And he mentioned the important question of circularity. Continue reading

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Is creole distinctiveness what we want to know about?

Over the last 15 years, some creolists have debated the question of creole distinctiveness (or “exceptionalism”). Some creolists such as McWhorter (2005) and Parkvall (2008) have argued that creoles are typologically special, while others (such as Chaudenson, DeGraff, Mufwene and Ansaldo) have emphasized the continuity between creoles and other languages. Continue reading

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Continent-wide typology: a recent trend within diversity linguistics

Classical Greenbergian typology is a world-wide enterprise: One studies a particular phenomenon in a wide range of languages from all corners of the earth. But in practice, most linguists who are interested in typology do not engage in world-wide comparison, and in fact, most linguists do not do much comparison at all: There are far more fieldworkers who are digging deep into individual languages than “desk typologists”. This is as it should be, Continue reading

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A catalogue of categories?

Linguists have their catalogue of languages, biologists are working on their catalogue of species, and chemists have their catalogue (“periodic system”) of elements. Full inventorization is clearly a desirable goal of science, and some kind of order in the phenomena is a prerequisite for deeper understanding. But do we also want a catalogue of linguistic categories? Continue reading

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Obituary: Alexander E. Kibrik (26.03.1939-31.10.2012)

Alexander Kibrik (Александр Евгеньевич Кибрик) passed away on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 after a long illness.

Alexander Kibrik was the head of the Chair of theoretical and applied linguistics of the Philological faculty of the Moscow State University from 1992  and until his death, and was involved with the department since its earliest days in 1960-ies. Continue reading

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Syntax of the World’s Languages 5 in Dubrovnik, a conference report

Eight years ago we decided to organize a new kind of conference in Leipzig, a syntax conference for linguists with a serious interest in the whole range of diversity of the world’s languages. In other words, a conference for fieldworkers and typologists, where the comparativists can meet the linguists with first-hand data experience, and where (unlike at typology conferences) fieldworkers who focus on a single language do not need to feel out of place (Syntax of the World’s Languages). This proved to be a success, and after Lancaster, Berlin and Lyon, the fifth conference in this biennial series was organized by the University of Zagreb’s Ranko Matasović, in Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast. Continue reading

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Typology: The study of unity or diversity?

Michael Daniel, in his chapter ‘Linguistic typology and the study of language’ in The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology, sets out to define the field of linguistic typology and situate it within linguistics generally. He opens with this:

Linguistic typology compares languages to learn how different languages are, to see how far these differences may go, and to find out what generalizations can be made regarding cross-linguistic variation. (Daniel 2011:44)

He also notes that “Most linguistic disciplines have cross-linguistic comparison in the background, if not as their main method or object of inquiry […]” (Daniel 2011:44). This is unsurprising, Continue reading

Daniel Hieber

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Towards Proto-Niger-Congo, a conference report

Last week, I attended an interesting and well-organized conference in Paris entitled Towards Proto-Niger-Congo: Comparison and reconstruction. The talks represented most of the major branches of Niger-Congo, as well as stock-level surveys, and some of the highlights from my own perspective were the following:

  • Gregory Anderson’s discussion of S/TAM/P (pronounced as “stamp”) morphemes in Niger-Congo where one often finds “portmanteau morphs that encode the referent properties of subjects in addition to various TAM and polarity categories”. Continue reading
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On Larry Hyman on the universality of the syllable

The sound strings of all spoken languages alternate between consonants and vowels (CVCV…), so it is natural for the naive observer to assume that all languages also have syllables. But phonologists do not want to posit superfluous categories, so they need to be convinced that there are some generalizations that need to be stated in terms of a category “syllable”. Chomsky & Halle (1968) thought that they could describe English without positing a syllable, but its seems that since [Bybee] Hooper 1972, everyone has assumed that syllables play a role in phonology – not only in English, but probably in all languages. Especially phonotactic constraints such as consonant cooccurrence are much easier to state if reference can be made to a syllable constituent. But are all languages like English? Well, most probably are, but Hyman (1983) noted that in the Nigerian language Gokana, syllable constituent is not required for any kind of phonological generalization. “Prosodic stems” have the shape CV(V)(C)(V)(V) (e.g. té, bèè, búl, kávà, bùùrù, kùmìè, ʔoòà, bèèàɛ̀), and no reference to the syllable is necessary to describe the phonotactically possible patterns.

So does this mean that we have an exception to the universal that “all languages have syllables”? Continue reading

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Deductive vs. aprioristic theories: Continuing the debate on word-class universality

Generative and nongenerative diversity linguists do not often engage in debates on general issues, but the topic of word-classes (nouns, verbs and adjectives) seems to be an area where some kind of dialogue seems to be not impossible (cf. Baker 2003, Croft 2009, and the 2005 LSA Institute class taught jointly by Baker and Croft, presenting their contrasting approaches to the students). Now the open-peer-commentary journal Theoretical Linguistics has published a very nice target article on word-classes in Chamorro by Sandy Chung (Chung 2012a), with commentaries by various linguists, including three nongenerativists (Bill Croft, Eva van Lier, and myself). Continue reading

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Collaborative comparative linguistics via specialist consortia

To compare many different (including little-studied) languages around the world, comparative linguists need access to good data, which is often difficult to get. Many research questions cannot be answered easily by consulting reference works such as dictionaries and grammars. We often see some interesting variation between a number of languages we know well, and we’d like to know how the parameter in question is distributed elsewhere, ideally throughout the world. What should we do? Continue reading

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Panchronic semantics

In historical linguistics, it is obvious that the general principles of phonetic changes (which some, following Haudricourt, call ‘Panchronic Phonology’) are much better understood than those operating in morphology, and that historical morphology is generally better understood than historical syntax (a field which is however undergoing important developments in recent times with articles such as Eythorsson and Barðdal 2005).

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