“Clause” and “sentence” are two terms that linguists use all the time, but they have a hard time explaining what they mean. I recently posted a question about this on Facebook, and my feeling was confirmed that there is a lot of uncertainty about these two terms. They are almost never discussed, but I think that it’s worth attempting to use precise terminology in linguistics, so here are some thoughts and proposals (also about the term main clause, which also causes confusion). Continue reading
Martin Haspelmath: Yakov, you have been following theoretical and comparative research in morphosyntax over more than four decades (we first met in Moscow in 1986), and you have been discussing these things with me on and off (for completeness, let me add that you are at the RAS Institute of Linguistics and at Russian State University for the Humanities). Most recently, you gave an initial opinion on my question of what “formal linguistics“ is – see this earlier blogpost. You seemed to agree that “formal linguistics“ is widely understood in the narrower sense of ”an approach that accepts (explicitly or tacitly) Noam Chomsky’s philosophy of language”. Continue reading
A while ago, Roberta D’Alessandro proposed to her Facebook friends to say something positive about an approach that they otherwise criticize or reject, with the goal of making the interaction among linguists more positive. Since I often criticize generative approaches, I felt invited to say something positive about generative syntax, and here is what I came up with: Continue reading
