I have written about the bad effects of Revise & Resubmit (R&R) earlier (here and here), but I keep hearing from people who see no problems with this type of editorial decision in journal editing, so I need come back to it. This is also because I hear more and more about the unhappiness that it causes in people’s lives, and I feel that much of this is unnecessary. Continue reading
Dear José-Luis,
Many thanks for your open letter of March 2020 (on your blog and on Lingbuzz), where you discuss a number of recent contributions of mine, and where you argue that in contrast to what my 2020a paper on linguisticality and recent blogposts imply, there are no problems with generative grammar (GG) once one adopts a correct general perspective, because GG does not assume innate building blocks. [There is also a Lingbuzz version of this response.] Continue reading
How can our general understanding of Human Language contribute to making peculiar language-particular patterns more comprehensible? This is what I keep wondering about, and in the recent excellent paper by Peter Arkadiev and Yakov Testelets, we find a really interesting case for discussion: the flag-article suffixes in the Circassian languages (Kabardian and Adyghe, two very closely related languages of the northern Caucasus region). These suffixes (Absolutive suffix -r, Oblique suffix -m) occur only on a nominal only when it is specific, and may be omitted when it is nonspecific: Continue reading
At this year’s annual meeting of the DGfS in Hamburg (2020), I organized a workshop on the empirical testing of grammatical universals, because I feel that universals are too often taken for granted (here is the handout of my talk). The well-known example of a universal morphology-syntax distinction is just the tip of the iceberg. Weirdly, Bauer (2019: 2) says in his recent book on the foundations of morphology: Continue reading
Many linguists think that broad cross-linguistic comparison is sometimes “too shallow”, and that instead, language universals can be detected only if they are based on “in-depth”, “abstract” and “detailed” analyses. Here I give reasons to think that this is the wrong approach. This discussion is not new (cf. Comrie 1981; Coopmans 1983), but it needs to be revisited, because this erroneous idea remains very strong in the discipline. Continue reading
