In the position paper of their new work on “non-verbal predication” (Bertinetto et al. 2026), which I discussed in two earlier blogposts here and here), Creissels et al. distinguish two “functional types” of “nominal predication”: inclusion predication (§4.1) and identity predication (§4.2). Most of the examples throughout their paper are of the “inclusion” type, which seems to be much more commonly described in grammars (maybe because it is more frequent in discourse?). The contrast can be illustrated by (i)-(ii): Continue reading
How useful are retro-definitions for (typological) linguistics? (Maybe not very.)
Like all sciences, linguistics needs technical terms, and we generally treat the grammatical terms that we inherited from our ancestors (such as syllable,
affix, compound, dative, imperative, subordination) as technical terms: We list and define them in terminological dictionaries (such as Matthews’s “Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics”), and we expect students to learn them (textbooks often have appendixes with lists of terms). So in a practical sense, we take them quite seriously.
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On numeratives (or: Why “numeral classifiers” are not kinds of “classifiers”)
“Classifiers” are fascinating and have often been discussed, especially for Asian languages, but also for languages of Mesoamerica and South America and elsewhere. But what exactly is a “classifier”? I have long wondered about this, and recently I published a paper on numeratives. Why don’t I call them “numeral classifiers”? Continue reading
What is a “copula”, and what is “predicative inflection”? Further comments on Creissels et al. (2026)
One important concept in all discussions of nonverbal clause constructions (or “non-verbal predication”) is the term “copula” – but what exactly is a copula? Here I continue the discussion of Creissels et al. (2016) (following an earlier blogpost), who distinguish between four strategies (“formal types”) of “predicative marking” in such constructions (p. 15): Continue reading
When is “adjectival predication“ non-verbal? Some comments on Creissels et al. (2026)
This autumn, De Gruyter’s “Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics” was enriched by another voluminous work: “Non-verbal predication in the world’s languages”, in two volumes with over 1200 pages, edited by Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci, and Denis Creissels. Continue reading
Is partial templaticity an attested process?
This post is written with the goal of finding patterns that are predicted by formal analyses, but possibly do not exist. If they really do not exist, one might ask why. The issue is important to me in light of an upcoming invitation to speak about “prosodic templates” in May 2025.
Continue readingThe CrossGram collection of typological databases: A new resource for cross-linguistic grammatical research
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
“Irrealis is real“, but what are the predictions?
Semantic typology is based on semantic comparative concepts (or comparison meanings, as I have come to call them), and these concepts usually have labels that come from a particular language. Thus, the Concepticon, a systematic list of 3971 comparison meanings for word comparison, uses English labels for its comparative concepts.
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50 years of syntactic function typology: The birth of “grammatical relations” in the summer of 1974
The syntactic functions “subject” and “object” (and a few others) have been an important topic of general syntax over the last half century. Interestingly, the birth of syntactic function typology can be dated rather precisely: It happened in the summer of 1974, in Amherst, Massachusetts (USA), at the Linguistic Institute of the LSA. This was where David Perlmutter and Paul Postal taught their famous first class on “Relational Grammar”, and where many ideas were discussed that had become part of the typological mainstream only 10 years later. That summer school at UMass was thus a remarkable event in the history of syntactic research. Continue reading
Do we store “words”? Moving beyond the “lexicon” confusion
Many linguists are aware that two of the most basic concepts of our field, “word” and “lexicon”, are used in confusing ways. But can we do something about this, other than pointing out the confusions once in a while? I now think we can, by defining “word” in a precise way (Haspelmath 2023), and by replacing “lexicon/lexical” in by one of four other terms if necessary (set of words, lexemicon, inventorium, mentalicon). For mnemonic reasons and because it was fun, I published my paper about “word” in the journal WORD, and my paper about “lexicon” was recently published in the journal “Lexique” (Haspelmath 2024b). Continue reading
Where I went wrong (II): Converbs are not “non-finite verbal adverbs”
Another way in which I went wrong in the 1990s was by proposing a definition of converb as a “non-finite verbal adverb” (see this earlier blogpost about my error about iconicity). At the time (Haspelmath 1995), I was quite naïve about the traditional notions of “finiteness” and “adverb”, and I now think that defining “converb” in this way was not a good idea. Continue reading
Against (lexical-)categorial typology: Why school grammars are basically right
Syntax textbooks often emphasize that word classes must be identified by grammatical tests, rather than by their meanings – in contrast to traditional school grammars and basic pedagogical texts, which often still say, for example, that “Nouns are a part of speech that indicate people, places, things, or ideas“. Continue reading
Can there be family-specific trends, or family-specific causal factors, in linguistic evolution?
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
Distributed Morphology is right: There is no “lexicon”
The terms lexicon and lexical have a range of different meanings in linguistics, and I have been wondering whether they could perhaps be replaced by something better. Thus, in the spirit of my 2006 paper against markedness, I now distinguish four senses of the traditional term “lexical (item)” (in a paper that will appear in the journal Lexique): Continue reading
The unsolved non-uniqueness problem and the dilemma of theoretical p-linguistics
Structural analyses of grammatical patterns are often non-unique, as was classically observed by Chao (1934): Different analyses often work equally well, to all appearances. This would not be a problem if linguists did not typically work with the background assumption that there is only one true analysis, which will lead us to deeper insights about Human Language in general. Continue reading