What kind of theory do we need for meaningful conversations about grammatical concepts (such as “personal pronoun”)?

The LINGTYP e-mail list is an old-fashioned way of communicating – it has existed for 23 years in its present format, as an unmoderated e-mail list for the typology community (made possibly by the LINGUIST List), and one might think that it should have been replaced by something more modern. But it continues to be very useful, I find, and again this month (July 2021), there were some really interesting discussions, on the meaning of the term “personal pronoun”, as well as on the nature of grammatical concepts. Continue reading

What do we mean by “existential clause”?

Some of our most common technical terms that we all take to be widely understood don’t have a clear meaning – I observed this earlier for the terms “morph”, “bound form” and “affix”, and in this blog post, I will discuss “existential clause” (or “existential sentence”; the difference between these does not matter in the present context). There are some stereotypical cases that everyone would agree are existential clauses, like (1) and (2) but beyond that, the precise extension of the term is not clear. In the spirit of my proposal to provide retro-definitions for widely used terms, I will propose a definition here. Continue reading