Over the last two decades, our picture of worldwide grammatical diversity and uniformity has become much richer. While language universals research was initiated by Greenberg (ed.) 1963 and Greenberg (ed.) 1978, and the comparative perspective has been adopted by generative syntacticians as well (e.g. Roberts 1996; Newmeyer 2008), it was only with the publication of the World atlas of language structures (WALS, in book format 2005, online 2008/2013) that worldwide grammatical diversity has been readily accessible to a larger audience. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts

Over the last decade, there have been repeated suggestions that causal factors in diachronic change (or linguistic evolution) might be family-specific (or “lineage-specific”, using a term from biology). For example, Dediu & Levinson (2012) say: Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts

The best-known differential-coding scale is the well-known “extended animacy hierarchy” in (1)

(1) 1st/2nd > 3rd > human > animate > inanimate

This scale can be taken as a basis for two well-known generalizations about semantic-role coding, about differential (or split) object marking (DOM, e.g. Bossong 1991; Aissen 2003) and split (or differential) ergative marking (e.g. Dixon 1994). Informally and in a simplified way, they can be stated as in (2) and (3). Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts

I recently published a paper in WORD (“Defining the word”), and this made me curious about the fascinating history of this journal. It turns out that it has close links with the Greenberg-Jakobson connection that I have been interested in for quite some time. My long-standing interest in asymmetric coding patterns (e.g. Haspelmath 2021) was kindled by Croft’s (1990) “typological markedness”, which is based on Greenberg (1966), a major contribution to typology that was largely overlooked for a long time (unlike his 1963 paper, which became famous fast). In turn, Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) was clearly influenced by Roman Jakobson  (1896-1982), from whom he adopted the term “markedness”. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts

What exactly is a word? How can we distinguish morphology (= word structure) from syntax? How do we tell phrases apart from complex words, and clitics from affixes? In my 2011 paper (“The indeterminacy of word segmentation”) I said that we don’t know: The various criteria that we typically use do not necessarily give the same results, and it could be that a notion of “word” plays no role in general grammar. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts

[Normally this blog is reserved for strictly scientific issues. This post is an exception, about a situation when politics gets in the way of science.]

Over the last few months, several international conferences in Germany announced that they were forced to boycott participants from Russia because of a requirement imposed by their funders, the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany’s main funding agency for academic research).
Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts