The idea that inflectional features like tense and number often have two contrasting values which are somehow systematically asymmetric goes back to Jakobson (1932; 1957), and his idea that often one value is marked and the other unmarked has been very influential, especially in structural/generative linguistics. The term “markedness” has also been used in many other ways, leading to a lot of confusion, and I recommended doing without it entirely (Haspelmath 2006). Continue reading
Serial verb constructions: A critical assessment of Haspelmath’s interpretation
(The following was originally written as a letter to the editor of the journal Language and Linguistics, where Haspelmath (2016) was published; L&L declined to publish it, so it is published here.)
In my (2011) paper on the indeterminacy of word segmentation, I despaired of the task of distinguishing between “words” and “affixes”, but in the meantime, I have become more optimistic. I am now ready to answer the above question (“What is an affix?”) by a proposal for a definition. Continue reading
