Affixes are bound forms of a special kind – they are not defined by their phonological properties

A few weeks ago, a new paper of mine on bound forms and affixes was published by the journal Voprosy Jazykoznanija. This has long been the most important Russian linguistics journal, and it now publishes articles in English as well. Here’s an introduction to some of the key points of the paper (Haspelmath 2021a). Continue reading

On David Adger on reduced innateness and “placeholders for a better understanding”

In a recent blogpost, David Adger replied to my earlier post about “abandoning innateness”, trying to explain to me how one can be a mainstream generative grammarian (MGGer) and still say that most of the technical devices of one’s analyses are not innate. (I’m saying “MGGer” here, because practitioners of HPSG have long been explicit that they do not assume that the devices of their framework are innate; cf. Borsley & Müller (2021), in the forthcoming HPSG handbook). Continue reading

Some (ex-)generative grammarians who are abandoning innateness

In the 1960s, a view of language became famous according to which key aspects of grammatical structures are innate and “grow” in the child (rather than being learned). This came in two prominent versions: the “formal and substantive universals” of Chomsky (1965), and later the “principles and parameters” of Chomsky’s (1981) Government and Binding (GB) approach. But in the 21st century, there seems to be less and less certainty about the idea of innate grammatical structures (called “universal grammar”, Continue reading