I am often asked to review a paper for an edited volume (or special issue of a journal), but I am generally reluctant to do this, for reasons that take a little more space to explain. So here’s why. (This blog post is of course of more general relevance than the general theme of diversity linguistics, but I couldn’t think of a better venue for it.) 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
Generative and nongenerative diversity linguists do not often engage in debates on general issues, but the topic of word-classes (nouns, verbs and adjectives) seems to be an area where some kind of dialogue seems to be not impossible (cf. Baker 2003, Croft 2009, and the 2005 LSA Institute class taught jointly by Baker and Croft, presenting their contrasting approaches to the students). Now the open-peer-commentary journal Theoretical Linguistics has published a very nice target article on word-classes in Chamorro by Sandy Chung (Chung 2012a), with commentaries by various linguists, including three nongenerativists (Bill Croft, Eva van Lier, and myself). Continue reading
To compare many different (including little-studied) languages around the world, comparative linguists need access to good data, which is often difficult to get. Many research questions cannot be answered easily by consulting reference works such as dictionaries and grammars. We often see some interesting variation between a number of languages we know well, and we’d like to know how the parameter in question is distributed elsewhere, ideally throughout the world. What should we do? Continue reading
This is not a question that Gorenflo et al. (2012) ask in their widely publicized PNAS article on the “co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity”. They seem to subtly presuppose a positive answer, but one wonders about the precise implications of this.
The contribution appeared as a regular scientific paper in the high-profile Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and it contains the usual trappings of such a paper: maps, charts and statistics. Like many PNAS papers on readily accessible topics, it was widely reported on in the media (e.g. here and here). But the major finding is neither new, nor do the authors have an explanation: Continue reading
Linguists treat many technical terms as so well-established that they are not in need of explanation or definition, or that any further discussion is a secondary matter. But even a widely used term such as “word” is not well-understood (Haspelmath 2011), so it is not surprising that more specialized terms such as “noun incorporation” suffer from the same problems. This is clearest if one defines “noun incorporation” in terms of wordhood, as in de Reuse (1994a: 2842), where noun incoproration is defined as
“the morphological construction where a nominal lexical element is added to a verbal lexical element; the resulting construction being a verb and a single word”
A few months ago, there was a lively discussion at Languagehat of my proposal that grammatical theory should be framework-free (Haspelmath 2010), and that each new language should be approached without preconceptions. Some discussants agreed, but others disagreed. As so often, the physics analogy came up:
I cannot imagine a physicist publishing an article saying, “We have no chance of discovering the Higgs Boson, and even if we did it would not solve the problem of where gravity comes from. So we ought to close CERN and go back to tabulating meticulous measurements of planetary motion.” And it seems that this kind of retrenchment is what is proposed for linguistics.
