Monthly Archives: January 2014

Need and Have, again

Posted on by
Reply
Almost two years ago, I posted on DLC a comment on an article published in Linguistic Inquiry:
After posting, I was contacted by Richard Kayne himself, and had rich discussions with him. This encouraged me to turn the posting into an article. I co-wrote it with my colleague Anton Antonov, who discovered the other counterexamples in various languages (we decided to abandon the original Japhug example as it was too complicated to explain in a few pages). The article is now published:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/ling/45/1

This article would never have been written without DLC, and it shows that this blog can foster discussions between generativists and typologists.

Guillaume Jacques

More Posts - Website

A proposal for radical publication reform in linguistics: Language Science Press, and the next steps

Posted on by
16

Book publication in linguistics (and other fields of scholarship) has become so absurd that I’ve started saying that it’s the biggest problem of contemporary linguistics: Books of major publishers cost about €0.20-0.40 per page, and articles are even worse. This is something that perhaps I notice more than other linguists in the richer countries, because as a typologist I need access to works on many different languages. The commercial publishers would argue that this is unavoidable, but filesharing has become so easy that I expect fewer and fewer scholars to be willing to accept this argumentation in the future. What is it that the commercial publishers add to the value of our manuscripts? Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

More Posts

Languoid, Doculect and Glossonym: Formalizing the Notion ‘Language’

Posted on by
6

Martin Haspelmath’s (2013) recent post in this forum discussed the criticism by Morey et al. (2013) of the ISO 639-3 three-letter codes for language identification. In agreement with Martin, I would strongly urge linguists not to swim against the tide but to go with the flow and accept ISO 639-3 as a useful initiative for specific use-cases. The ISO 639-3 codes are not the holy grail that will solve all our problems concerning language-identification, but they have their merits. Most importantly, it is still one of the few resources that at least tries to provide a comprehensive catalogue of the world’s linguistic diversity. If one criticises SIL and their Ethnologue (which is the basis of ISO 639-3), then at least one should also acknowledge that they have been working on this catalogue for decades, and in all this time no other institutionalised linguist has tried to improve, or at least parallel, their effort. Continue reading →

Michael Cysouw

More Posts