It is with great sadness that I react to the death of Annegret Bollée, distinguished creolist, professor at Bamberg University, my dear colleague and dearest friend. We had the great pleasure to celebrate her lifetime achievement award of Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics just some weeks ago at the SPCL online summer meeting. Annegret gave an interesting talk about her current work on word formation in creole languages. She once more showed that her breadth of knowledge on French creoles and related French dialects (in synchrony and diachrony) has been and will stay outstanding for future creolists and language contact specialists. What a gift for creole studies and for all of us she was! Continue reading →

susannemichaelis

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A few months ago, I was invited to give an online presentation to the Center for Linguistic Sciences of Beijing Normal University (my host was Chia-Jung Pan). This blogpost summarizes the main points of the talk (based on the talk handout; there is also a video of the talk, with questions, on Bilibili). The title of the talk was: “Structural, evolutionary and biocognitive explanations are mutually compatible”. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Cross-linguistic research is not easy because one needs to examine languages of diverse structures, but here I argue that typological classification is never “difficult”. The literature contains many references to such difficulties, but in fact, the main practical difficulty is obtaining complete data for a wide range of languages. And of course, one needs to find the right questions to ask if one wants to get interesting answers; but this is not a “difficulty” – it is the primary challenge of any kind of creative research enterprise. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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The LINGTYP e-mail list is an old-fashioned way of communicating – it has existed for 23 years in its present format, as an unmoderated e-mail list for the typology community (made possibly by the LINGUIST List), and one might think that it should have been replaced by something more modern. But it continues to be very useful, I find, and again this month (July 2021), there were some really interesting discussions, on the meaning of the term “personal pronoun”, as well as on the nature of grammatical concepts. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Some of our most common technical terms that we all take to be widely understood don’t have a clear meaning – I observed this earlier for the terms “morph”, “bound form” and “affix”, and in this blog post, I will discuss “existential clause” (or “existential sentence”; the difference between these does not matter in the present context). There are some stereotypical cases that everyone would agree are existential clauses, like (1) and (2) but beyond that, the precise extension of the term is not clear. In the spirit of my proposal to provide retro-definitions for widely used terms, I will propose a definition here. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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A few weeks ago, a new paper of mine on bound forms and affixes was published by the journal Voprosy Jazykoznanija. This has long been the most important Russian linguistics journal, and it now publishes articles in English as well. Here’s an introduction to some of the key points of the paper (Haspelmath 2021a). Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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In a recent blogpost, David Adger replied to my earlier post about “abandoning innateness”, trying to explain to me how one can be a mainstream generative grammarian (MGGer) and still say that most of the technical devices of one’s analyses are not innate. (I’m saying “MGGer” here, because practitioners of HPSG have long been explicit that they do not assume that the devices of their framework are innate; cf. Borsley & Müller (2021), in the forthcoming HPSG handbook). Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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In the 1960s, a view of language became famous according to which key aspects of grammatical structures are innate and “grow” in the child (rather than being learned). This came in two prominent versions: the “formal and substantive universals” of Chomsky (1965), and later the “principles and parameters” of Chomsky’s (1981) Government and Binding (GB) approach. But in the 21st century, there seems to be less and less certainty about the idea of innate grammatical structures (called “universal grammar”, Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Scales of referential prominence (animate > inanimate, definite > indefinite, locuphoric (1st/2nd) > aliophoric (3rd), topical > non-topical) are known to play a role in differential object marking generalizations. But what exactly is their role? Do they merely “capture descriptive generalizations”, or is there “explanatory power” in theories that invoke them (such as Aissen 2003; Haspelmath 2021)? Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Since the 1960s, many works on syntax have primarily relied on acceptability judgements, rather than on examples attested in corpora, as was common in earlier times. In Jespersen’s Essentials of English grammar (1933), there were many invented examples, but also quite a few observed corpus attestations (from authors such as Shakespeare, Austen, Thackeray, Carlyle). But over the last five decades, syntacticians have relied much more on experimental methods, which allowed them to make great progress in exploring the incredibly rich patterns of the major languages. (Note that I include acceptability judgements of all kinds under “experiments” here, because they all go beyond pure observation of naturally occurring speech.) Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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