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

The description-comparison approach and the audacious Chomskyan approach (or: how to frame better)

According to George Lakoff, we should frame ourselves, because otherwise we will be framed by others. This is an interesting thought, and indeed, linguists of different orientations constantly frame others and themselves. I have not been happy with many of these framings, and here I’ll make another attempt. Continue reading

We are all constructionists

Many linguists use ideological-sounding labels to identify themselves (or their colleagues), and I keep wondering about the purpose and content of these labels – what exactly is a cognitive linguist , for example? Is it someone who shares Lakoff’s (1991) “cognitive commitment” (to make their account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and brain from other disciplines”)? But why “commitment” – isn’t this simply a general and uncontroversial principle of science? Continue reading

Construct marking: Markers on modified nouns to signal the presence of a modifier (some comments on Creissels 2018)

Many languages have a genitive flag in their adpossessive nominals, i.e. a case-marker or adposition on the possessor nominal (e.g. English [Kim’s] money, the roof [of the house]). But alternatively, they may also have a marker on the possessed noun – an antigenitive marker. For example, Ge’ez (an ancient Semitic language of Africa) had an antigenitive suffix -a, as in wald ‘son’, wald-a nəguś [son-ANTG king] ‘the son of the king’. Continue reading

Zeroes and transformations: Good for p-analyses, useless for g-linguistics?

Since the mid-20th century, structural linguists have often made use of two types of abstract devices that were not part of the earlier arsenal (which did of course include rules and paradigms): zero elements (or empty positions), and transformations (or derivations, or operations). Continue reading

Revise & Resubmit is damaging to science and should be abandoned

I have written about the bad effects of Revise & Resubmit (R&R) earlier (here and here), but I keep hearing from people who see no problems with this type of editorial decision in journal editing, so I need come back to it. This is also because I hear more and more about the unhappiness that it causes in people’s lives, and I feel that much of this is unnecessary. Continue reading

Why generative grammar needs innate building blocks in practice: An open response to José-Luis Mendívil-Giró

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

Two methods for comparative grammar: Measurement uniformity and building block uniformity

At this year’s annual meeting of the DGfS in Hamburg (2020), I organized a workshop on the empirical testing of grammatical universals, because I feel that universals are too often taken for granted (here is the handout of my talk). The well-known example of a universal morphology-syntax distinction is just the tip of the iceberg. Weirdly, Bauer (2019: 2) says in his recent book on the foundations of morphology: Continue reading

Rigour is more important than depth: Why language universals should not be based on in-depth analysis

Many linguists think that broad cross-linguistic comparison is sometimes “too shallow”, and that instead, language universals can be detected only if they are based on “in-depth”, “abstract” and “detailed” analyses. Here I give reasons to think that this is the wrong approach. This discussion is not new (cf. Comrie 1981; Coopmans 1983), but it needs to be revisited, because this erroneous idea remains very strong in the discipline. Continue reading

Against “allomorphy“ (and what to replace it with: morph variants  and suppletive morph sets)

Every linguist knows the term “allomorph”, but we cannot agree on what it means. I will argue here that this is a terminological issue, not a substantive issue. Of course, we disagree on many substantive issues (and in particular, on strategic issues), but there is no reason to “disagree” on terminological issues – this is merely a matter of convenience, and just as we agree on the IPA, we could easily agree on morphosyntactic notation/terminology if we wanted. Continue reading

Why flags are bound forms: A discussion with Bill Croft

A flag is a cover term for an adposition or a case-marker, as I explain in my recent 2019 paper on flagging and indexing (in the journal Te Reo, run by the Linguistic Society of New Zealand). All comparative linguists know that in many cases, it is not quite clear whether we should treat an element (such as the Japanese accusative marker o, or the Arabic dative marker li) as an affix and thus a case-marker, or as an adposition (i.e. a form that is not an affix). The term flag serves as a convenient cover term for comparative linguists in situations where it does not matter. Continue reading

The General Category Fallacy: Why grammatical category-assignment does not give us more insights

Describing a language means finding recurring elements in texts: not only recurring phonemes and words, but also recurring constructions – and to describe a construction, one needs to have classes (= categories) of forms that can go into a constructional slot. Everyone knows this, so where is the problem, and what is the General Category Fallacy (described in my 2018 paper, in §1 and §7)? Continue reading

The “typology vs. theory“ mistake: Why “comparative linguistics“ is the best label

There is a misleading but widespread stereotype in linguistics: that “language typology” is somehow opposed to “linguistic theory”. Dryer (2006) has explained why this is wrong, but the stereotype keeps being repeated, so I feel that I need to write again about it. And in the end, I think that the “typology” label has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced by “comparative linguistics” – also because in other disciplines, the label has completely different associations. Continue reading

Comparative linguistics does not need “causation” or “grammatical theory”

In a 2017 discussion note (in the Journal LT), Randy LaPolla confesses that he was “shocked” when he heard that some comparative linguists base their comparisons on the phenomena found in languages, not some underlying “causal” level of language (2017: 553). For example, in classifying Mandarin Chinese as an SVO (or A-V-P) language, they make use of the comparative concepts A and P, rather than the notion of Mandarin Topic, which is required to state the rules of Mandarin word order (and is in this sense a causal factor determining word order in the language). Continue reading

Right and wrong in typology: Chappell & Creissels versus Stassen on predpossessive constructions

In an excellent recent paper in Linguistic Typology that I recomment to all linguists, Hilary Chappell and Denis Creissels argue against Leon Stassen’s (2005; 2009) classification of Mandarin Chinese predpossessive constructions as in (1).

(1) 她有书 Tā yŏu shū. [3SG have/exist book] ‘She has a book.’ Continue reading