Is “markedness” still alive? On Kiparsky, Dixon and some others

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

Aikhenvald & Dixon on Haspelmath (2016) on serial verb constructions

Serial verb constructions: A critical assessment of Haspelmath’s interpretation

by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon

(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.)