Dear José-Luis,
Many thanks for your open letter of March 2020 (on your blog and on Lingbuzz), where you discuss a number of recent contributions of mine, and where you argue that in contrast to what my 2020a paper on linguisticality and recent blogposts imply, there are no problems with generative grammar (GG) once one adopts a correct general perspective, because GG does not assume innate building blocks. [There is also a Lingbuzz version of this response.] Continue reading
Jae Jung Song (1958-2017) published two typology textbooks, one in (2001) and another one earlier this year (which must have been finished just before his death), containing mostly new material. In particular, Chapter 7 of the new book deals with grammatical coding asymmetries and other “typological asymmetries”, as well as “markedness” and explanations in terms of iconicity, economy and frequency. Song makes extensive reference to some of my earlier work (Haspelmath 2006; 2008; Haspelmath et al. 2014), so it may be worth putting together a blogpost with some reactions. Continue reading
I recently saw an interesting article that asks about biases in evolutionary biology introduced by the fact that it is studied by humans. In linguistics, there is no shortage either of biases introduced by big languages such as Latin and English, and all linguists are at least aware of this possibility. But are we taking the potential problem seriously enough? Continue reading
The following text is a reply by Olaf Koeneman & Hedde Zeijlstra to Martin Haspelmath’s earlier post (Confused by syntax)
We thank Martin Haspelmath for allowing us to reply to his review of our book. We have divided our reply in two parts. In the first part, we make explicit what our choices have been in writing this textbook and why we made them. We believe that quite a few of Martin’s criticisms relate to these, often didactic, choices. In the second part we reply to some of the more detailed comments Continue reading
(See also a reply to this critical review by the authors: “Syntax and didactics“)
A new authoritative textbook on Chomskyan syntax
Papers in the framework of current mainstream generative grammar (MGG) are often difficult, or even impenetrable, to read, even when the reader is well-versed in syntax and in other models of generative syntax. They are mostly written for the community of practitioners, who naturally do not see a need to motivate their choices. I was thus happy to see a new textbook (“Introducing syntax”, Koeneman & Zeijlstra 2017), published by an authoritative publisher, and approved by Noam Chomsky himself Continue reading
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
At the 2008 annual conference of the SLE in the Italian provincial town of Forlì, Andrej Malchukov and Anna Siewierska organized a workshop on “Impersonal constructions: a cross-linguistic perspective”. In August 2011, a 641-page volume was published by Benjamins, edited by the two workshop organizers. (Sadly, the publication of the book coincided with Anna Siewierska’s tragic death on 6 August 2011.) This is the first book on impersonal constructions cross-linguistically, and its 20 papers cover a wide range of languages (over 150 languages and families are listed in the index).
I have long wondered what the factor uniting the various phenomena traditionally called “impersonal” might be. Continue reading
