Is there such a thing as “identity predication”? Further comments on Creissels et al. (2026)

In the position paper of their new work on “non-verbal predication” (Bertinetto et al. 2026), which I discussed in two earlier blogposts here and here), Creissels et al. distinguish two “functional types” of “nominal predication”: inclusion predication (§4.1) and identity predication (§4.2). Most of the examples throughout their paper are of the “inclusion” type, which seems to be much more commonly described in grammars (maybe because it is more frequent in discourse?). The contrast can be illustrated by (i)-(ii): Continue reading

How useful are retro-definitions for (typological) linguistics? (Maybe not very.)

Like all sciences, linguistics needs technical terms, and we generally treat the grammatical terms that we inherited from our ancestors (such as syllable, affix, compound, dative, imperative, subordination) as technical terms: We list and define them in terminological dictionaries (such as Matthews’s  “Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics”), and we expect students to learn them (textbooks often have appendixes with lists of terms). So in a practical sense, we take them quite seriously.
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On numeratives (or: Why “numeral classifiers” are not kinds of “classifiers”)

“Classifiers” are fascinating and have often been discussed, especially for Asian languages, but also for languages of Mesoamerica and South America and elsewhere. But what exactly is a “classifier”? I have long wondered about this, and recently I published a paper on numeratives. Why don’t I call them “numeral classifiers”? Continue reading