In this post and in a few that are planned for the future, I will highlight some things that (I now think) were wrong in my earlier scientific writings. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, and these posts will demonstrate that this can happen also within a scholar’s career (not only when a new generation takes over, as is expressed by “Planck’s principle”: “Science progresses one funeral at a time”). Continue reading
Many linguists have the intuition that affixes are “attached” to their bases, and we often informally use metaphorical terms such as “fused”, “cohering” and “tightly linked”. There is nothing to be said against metaphors in technical terminology, but do these expressions have a precise meaning? Since my 2011 paper in which I expressed doubts about the “word” concept, I have been thinking about better ways of capturing key distinctions of morphosyntax terminologically. Even earlier, I questioned the well-known “agglutination vs. flection” distinction (in Haspelmath 2009; originally presented in 1999), which has its roots in racist ideas about the superiority of Indo-European (“Aryan”) languages that were popular in German Romanticism. Continue reading
Guest post by Randy J. LaPolla (罗仁地), Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai
[The title of this post evokes and is meant as a tribute to Mickey Noonan’s 1999 paper, “Non-Structuralist syntax”. Although Noonan is arguing for a constructionist and integrative approach, he uses the term “syntax”, which doesn’t exist separately in a truly constructionist approach. Many claiming to be doing constructionist studies actually see the constructionist approach as just another form of syntactic analysis, but this is missing the whole non-componential nature of the constructionist approach (see Croft 2021 for discussion). The text was presented as a talk at Nankai University on 2022-05-25 as part of their “Experimental Linguistics” Online Forum, and is to appear (in Chinese) in the journal Experimental Linguistics.] Continue reading
In early October 1982, exactly forty years ago, I formally entered the field of academic linguistics, by enrolling at the University of Vienna in the programmes of Indo-European linguistics and general linguistics. A lot of things have happened in linguistics (and in my career) since, so in this blogpost, my reflections will be limited to a very selective and very personal perspective. Continue reading
