If you ever wondered what’s the difference between a morph and a morpheme, this blogpost contains an easy answer: Your stereotypical “morpheme” is actually a morph! No need to worry about all the problems with morphemes anymore: We can simply say “morph”, and continue to live happily. A morph is a minimal form, and if anyone has further questions about this definition, I’ve answered them in a forthcoming paper (“The morph as a minimal linguistic form”) Continue reading
At least since Greenberg’s seminal work on grammatical universals, comparative linguists have often talked about worldwide preferences in probabilistic terms. For example, Greenberg (1963) noted that “With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional” (Universal 4).
Since the 1970s, there has been increasing awareness that it is not sufficient to look at a few dozen languages that we happen to have easy access to (e.g. Bell 1978, Bakker 2011). Continue reading
