Since Caldwell (1856: 271), linguists have thought that the universal tendency of differential object marking (DOM) is explained by the pressure for languages to converge on efficient coding patterns, i.e. to concentrate their coding on the most atypical objects (namely referentially prominent, e.g. animate and definite, object nominals). This explanation was formulated clearly by Bossong (1991) (and also by Comrie 1989), and it seems that more and more evidence for it has been accumulating (e.g. Jäger 2007; Iemmolo 2011; Seržant & Witzlack-Makarevich (eds.) 2018). Even the OT-based formalization by Aissen (2003a) is explicitly functionally based. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Linguists often begin their papers by noting that the technical terms they use are not immediately clear to everyone, but why is this so? Why don’t we all use our terms with the same meanings, so that we can talk about the substantive issues right away, without clarifying the terminology first? Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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In 2016, I gave a talk about “Coptic as a language without words” (which is available  on YouTube; the handout is here), which was merely an illustration of a point that I had made in my earlier 2011 paper: That there is no general definition of ‘word’ that applies to all languages and that can be used in general linguistics (e.g. for universal claims about the nature of morphology, or for claims about “morphological typology”). The “word” notion is deeply entrenched in people’s consciousness because of our (Western) spelling habits, but it does not seem to be supported by evidence from morphosyntax of the world’s languages. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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The terms unergative and unaccusative were coined exactly 45 years ago, on October 30th in 1976. The person who suggested them was Geoffrey Pullum, in a personal letter to Paul Postal. We know about this from a “column” (a blogpost-like publication in a journal) that Pullum contributed to NLLT (Pullum 1988: 582). Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Everyone knows what a stereotypical pronoun is: they, she, he; and all linguists know that there are also interrogative pronouns (who, what), relative pronouns (who, which), and demonstrative pronouns (this, these). Or should we say “demonstrative adjectives”, because they are typically used in adnominal function (this room, these chairs)? And is a pronoun a type of noun, i.e. a “pro-noun” in the literal sense (standing for a noun)? If so, are there “pro-adjectives” and “pro-adverbs” as well? Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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It is with great sadness that I react to the death of Annegret Bollée, distinguished creolist, professor at Bamberg University, my dear colleague and dearest friend. We had the great pleasure to celebrate her lifetime achievement award of Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics just some weeks ago at the SPCL online summer meeting. Annegret gave an interesting talk about her current work on word formation in creole languages. She once more showed that her breadth of knowledge on French creoles and related French dialects (in synchrony and diachrony) has been and will stay outstanding for future creolists and language contact specialists. What a gift for creole studies and for all of us she was! Continue reading →

susannemichaelis

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A few months ago, I was invited to give an online presentation to the Center for Linguistic Sciences of Beijing Normal University (my host was Chia-Jung Pan). This blogpost summarizes the main points of the talk (based on the talk handout; there is also a video of the talk, with questions, on Bilibili). The title of the talk was: “Structural, evolutionary and biocognitive explanations are mutually compatible”. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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Cross-linguistic research is not easy because one needs to examine languages of diverse structures, but here I argue that typological classification is never “difficult”. The literature contains many references to such difficulties, but in fact, the main practical difficulty is obtaining complete data for a wide range of languages. And of course, one needs to find the right questions to ask if one wants to get interesting answers; but this is not a “difficulty” – it is the primary challenge of any kind of creative research enterprise. Continue reading →

Martin Haspelmath

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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 →

Martin Haspelmath

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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 →

Martin Haspelmath

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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 →

Martin Haspelmath

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