The Grammaticon: Linking grammatical comparative concepts to typological databases

This blogpost introduces a new resource for general-comparative linguistics: the Grammaticon, a collection of hundreds of grammatical comparative concept terms (Haspelmath & Englisch 2026). Version 1.0 has just gone online:

https://grammaticon.clld.org/

Many of these terms are linked to typological features represented in database collections such as WALS, Grambank, or APiCS. Grammatical terminology is quite variable (and often somewhat confusing), so the Grammaticon offers some guidance: Each term has a standard definition, and definitions are typically linked to other terminological resources (such as Wikipedia), and for many of the typological features, the Grammaticon explains how their technical terms relate to the definitions in the Grammaticon.

The Grammaticon was first conceived of in 2017, and the idea was presented at the ALT conference in Canberra (Haspelmath & Forkel 2017). Version 1.0 is now public, and it is hoped that it will be extended and improved greatly over the coming months and years.

Some frequently asked questions (FAQs):

Does the Grammaticon aim to contain the definitive list of all needed grammatical comparative-concept terms?

Not at all! It primarily aims to provide clear and sharp definitions of a wide range of terms that are already widely used as comparative concepts by linguists. The set of grammatical comparative-concept terms that one might need is completely open-ended, just like the set of lexical concepts that one might need for lexical comparison is open-ended. The Grammaticon took the Concepticon as a model (List et al. 2025), and evidently this is not intended to be exhaustive either. (For phonology, things are a bit different, because the IPA, which was a kind of model for the Grammaticon, is sometimes thought to be exhaustive. However, phoneticians are not usually optimistic about this…)

Aren’t grammatical phenomena distributed along multiple continua? So why are the definitions “sharp” rather than prototype-based?

It is true that the reality is often continuous (as Democritus famously noted), but scientists must impose sharp boundaries in order to capture this continuity quantitatively. Without sharp concepts as units of measurement, precise quantification is not possible, and all comparison remains vague.

What do you mean by “retro-definition”?

A retro-definition is a definition of a widely used term that does not have a widely accepted clear and simple definition in the earlier literature. Grammatical terminology has often been introduced and spread via salient examples, not via definitions. Most linguists can give examples of “dative” or “clitic”, because these terms are widely used and salient examples come to mind readily. But linguists generally do not give definitions, maybe because they think that the terms should reflect the reality directly. However, comparative concepts are instruments for “measuring” linguistic diversity and similarities, and they are not meant to reflect the universal innate building blocks that languages might be made up of.

But wouldn’t it make more sense to use much more fine-grained comparative concepts for quantification? In the Grammaticon, you have sharply defined coarse-grained concepts such as “compound” and even “word”.

Fine-grained comparative concepts are often needed to capture lower-level patterns, but linguists are often interested in higher-level patterns as well, such as the order of object and verb (which is correlated with quite a few other order properties). For the latter type of pattern, we need definitions of coarse-grained concepts such as “verb” and “object” (= P-argument). And for rigorous quantification, these terms need to be defined sharply.

The Grammaticon definitions use ordinary language (no abbreviations or other notational devices) and recognize that some terms cannot be defined – they are treated as “primitives”. Is it an accident that this approach is similar to Anna Wierzbicka‘s NSM approach (Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wierzbicka 1996)?

It is not an accident – the Grammaticon has been inspired by Igor Mel‘čuk‘s approach to definitions of linguistic terms (e.g. Mel‘čuk 1982), and Mel‘čuk in turn inspired Wierzbicka in the 1960s. For the meanings of ordinary words, Wierzbicka‘s approach is compelling and almost without rivals, and it seems to me that technical terms of grammar are best treated in a similar way.

Do you expect the Grammaticon definitions to become standard in the field?

Not really, because linguistics is practiced very widely – by hundreds of thousands of language teachers worldwide, who need terms to explain the basic concepts of grammar. There is no mechanism for standardizing grammatical terminology, and no widespread awareness that linguistics could be like astronomy or chemistry, where there are international standardization committees (cf. Haspelmath 2021). The IPA has been widely accepted, but phonological segments are much simpler to define (in terms of a few articulatory parameters). Morphosyntactic terms are much less straightforward, so for the time being, I see the Grammaticon as a niche product for specialized purposes – we will see how other linguists react to its proposals. In any event, it does not matter if there are multiple standards, as with Ethnologue and Glottolog, as long as they are linked together. The Grammaticon links to William Croft’s comparative concepts (Croft 2022), which is a very similar enterprise, as well as to Wikipedia and the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. We will see how these various efforts will develop in the future.

References

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the world’s languages (Plus Glossary of Terms). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (https://zenodo.org/records/19018210)

Haspelmath, Martin. 2021. Towards standardization of morphosyntactic terminology for general linguistics. In Alfieri, Luca & Arcodia, Giorgio Francesco & Ramat, Paolo (eds.), Linguistic categories, language description and linguistic typology, 35–57. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (DOI: 10.1075/tsl.132.02has, https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005489)

Haspelmath, Martin & Englisch, Johannes. 2026. Grammaticon 1.0. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (https://grammaticon.clld.org/)

Haspelmath, Martin & Forkel, Robert. 2017. Toward a standard list of grammatical comparative concepts: The Grammaticon. Presentation at ALT in Canberra (ANU). (https://zenodo.org/records/19028392)

List, Johann Mattis & Tjuka, Annika & Blum, Frederic & Kučerová, Alžběta & Ugarte, Carlos Barrientos & Rzymski, Christoph & Greenhill, Simon & Forkel, Robert (eds.). 2025. Concepticon 3.4.0. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (https://concepticon.clld.org/)

Mel’čuk, Igor A. 1982. Towards a language of linguistics: A system of formal notions for theoretical morphology. Munich: Fink.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Martin Haspelmath (April 22, 2026). The Grammaticon: Linking grammatical comparative concepts to typological databases. Diversity Linguistics Comment. Retrieved May 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1646q


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