Martin Haspelmath: Many thanks, John, for reading my paper “Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries” so carefully as a reviewer for a journal. We have known each other for a long time, so there is no reason not to have this discussion in the open. I have learned a lot from your three books (1994; 2004; 2014), and your work has been a constant inspiration. So what do you think about the theory of frequency-induced coding efficiency that I summarize in that paper? Continue reading
Linguists often try to characterize affixes in terms of a notion of “boundness“, as in this passage of the Wikipedia article “affix“:
“Lexical affixes are bound elements that appear as affixes, but function as incorporated nouns within verbs” Continue reading
Michel DeGraff is a prominent creolist and advocate of Haitian Creole, who works as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a recent short piece on human equality and UG (universal grammar), published on the occasion of Noam A. Chomsky’s 90th birthday. Continue reading
Many languages have special patient marking when the patient is referentially prominent (definite, animate, or a personal pronoun), and special agent marking when the agent is non-prominent. Typologists have been aware of this since the 1970s (e.g. Silverstein 1976; Moravcsik 1978), and the first type of phenomenon (typically called differential object marking, or DOM) is very widely known, as it occurs in well-known languages such as Spanish, Russian and Hindi-Urdu. Continue reading
