A proposal for the glossing of bound formatives without committing to their nature

Martin Haspelmath (2011) has argued that the notion ‘word’ is incoherent, and therefore is not useful as a cross-linguistically valid comparative concept or as a language-internal descriptive category. As a result, in his view, the distinction between bound formatives, e.g., affixes and clitics, is untenable. For example, in Lithuanian, the bound formative –si is traditionally analyzed as a suffix when it is in one position (after the verb when the verb has no prefixes) and as a prefix when it is in another position Continue reading

On double accusative marking

Recently on LINGTYP, a question was raised, which can be paraphrased as such: are there languages in which the P of a transitive clause is marked by two co-occurring flags (‘case-markers’), e.g., ACC1-N-ACC2 (or, presumably, N-ACC1-ACC2 or ACC1-ACC2-N)? After quite a bit of back-and-forth, it turns out that such situations seem to be extremely rare, while the co-occurrence of indexing and flagging seems to be much more common. Based on the discussion, and a closer look at some other sources, it turns out that only three scenarios are known to lead to double flagging. Interestingly (if not surprisingly), they all involve Differential Object Marking (DOM). Continue reading

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