Zeroes and transformations: Good for p-analyses, useless for g-linguistics?

Since the mid-20th century, structural linguists have often made use of two types of abstract devices that were not part of the earlier arsenal (which did of course include rules and paradigms): zero elements (or empty positions), and transformations (or derivations, or operations). Continue reading

Why meaning-form correspondence is not explanatory: Differential coding in locative and adpossessive constructions

Languages are systems that link forms (or shapes) to meanings, so in this sense, linguistic analysis consists in establishing meaning-form correspondences. And of course, such correspondences explain speaker behaviour. What I’m talking about in this post is a more ambitious kind of explanation: Explaining language structures by meaning-form correspondences. One well-known label for kinds of meaning-form correspondence is “iconicity” – so in a way, this blogpost continues the theme of my (2008) paper, which apparently has not lost its relevance. Continue reading

Do modern grammars retain traces of Proto-World?

We know almost nothing about the earliest language(s) of humans, because humans had language(s) over 100,000 years ago, and there are no records or other good methods for learning about those languages. But there is a lot of interesting speculation, and some of this is potentially relevant to understanding similarities among present-day languages. In particular, one might ask whether some similarities or universals are due to inheritance from Proto-World (the language from which all modern languages descend). Continue reading

Some issues with the correlated-evolution method for testing causal hypotheses in comparative linguistics

While comparative grammar research in the 20th century based its universal claims on stratified sampling (e.g. Bell 1978, Bakker 2011), in the 21st century, some authors have emphasized that sampling does not solve the issue of non-independence because all languages probably derive from a common ancestor or ancestral bottleneck (e.g. Maslova 2000; Levinson et al. 2011: 512). They have therefore given preference to the correlated-evolution method (Felsenstein 1985; Mace & Pagel 1994) that is firmly established in biology. Some representatives of this trend are Dunn et al. (2011), Widmer et al. (2017), and Jäger (2019). Continue reading

A conversation with Östen Dahl, on universals, grams, and p-/g-linguistics

Östen Dahl:

I just saw your recent paper on universals (“General linguistics must be based on universals (or nonconventional aspects of language)”). One immediate reaction I had was that a lot (perhaps most) of the phenomena that keep typologists busy are not universal but rather things that show up in some but not all languages. Just two examples (you’ll find more of them among the WALS chapters): classifiers and tone systems. You could perhaps say that they are universal in a very weak sense, viz. that hey are manifested in languages that have nothing to do with each other. In most cases, we have very vague ideas about the causal mechanisms behind them. What I wonder is whether linguistics isn’t unique among human and social sciences in its focus on universals. Continue reading