As an Athabaskanist working in Russia, Andrej Kibrik has long been interested in the head-marking/dependent-marking typology: Athapaskan languages mark the major clause roles by person prefixes on the verb, whereas the languages of Russia (Uralic, Turkic, Nakh-Daghestanian, etc.) almost all show extensive case-marking and limited person-indexing. In Kibrik (2012) (a paper that was originally presented at the LENCA conference in Kazan), he now urges linguists working on head-marking languages to draw the consequences from the parallelism between head and dependent marking and to use terminology familiar from case systems, i.e. “nominative/accusative” and “ergative/absolutive”, rather than “subject/object” or “agent/patient”.

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Martin Haspelmath

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For a long time, linguists have had the impression that creoles are particularly simple, but a precise and readily testable formulation of this insight has been difficult to come by. Important contributions to the recent debate include McWhorter (2001), Parkvall (2008) and Bakker et al. (2011). The latter two cite a lot of cross-linguistic data that will convince many quantitatively minded readers. But Good (2012) advances the debate in a different way, by taking apart the seemingly simple notion of “simplicity”. That complexity (and its converse, simplicity) can be understood in different ways should be clear, because these are simply words of the English language, not well-defined technical terms. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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