Martin Haspelmath

Against markedness (and what to replace it with)

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of ‘markedness’.

Pre-established categories don't exist: Consequences for language description and typology

Abstract 1. Introduction Structural categories of grammar (such as clitic, affix, compound, adjective, pronoun, dative, subject, passive, diphthong, coronal) have to be posited by linguists and by children during acquisition. This would be easier if they simply had to choose from a list of pre-established categories. However, existing proposals for what such a list might be are still heavily based on the Latin and English grammatical tradition. Thus, descriptive linguists still have no choice but to adopt the Boasian approach of positing special language-particular categories for each language. Theorists often resist it, but the crosslinguistic evidence is not converging on a smallish set of possibly innate categories. On the contrary, almost every newly described language presents us with some “crazy” new category that hardly fits existing taxonomies. Although there is thus no good evidence for pre-established categories, linguists still often engage in category-assignment controversies such as “Is the Tagalog ang-phrase a subject or a topic?”, “Is German er a pronoun or a determiner?”, “Are Mandarin Chinese property words adjectives or verbs?”, or “Is the Romanian definite article a clitic or a suffix?”

Language typology and language universals: An international handbook.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters to the patterns and limits of variation manifested by various analoguos structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (for example, word order, tense and aspect, inflection, colour terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The majority of the the articles are written in English, some in French or German.

Optimality and diachronic adaptation

In this programmatic paper, I argue that the universal constraints of Optimality Theory (OT) need to be complemented by a theory of diachronic adaptation. OT constraints are traditionally stipulated as part of Universal Grammar, but this misses the generalization that the grammatical constraints normally correspond to constraints on language use. As in biology, observed adaptive patterns in language can be explained through diachronic evolutionary processes, as the unintended cumulative outcome of numerous individual intentional actions. The theory of diachronic adaptation also provides a solution to the teleology problem, which has often been used as an argument against usage-based functional explanations. Finally, I argue against the view that the grammatical constraints could be due to accident. Thus, an adaptive explanation must eventually be found, whether at the level of language use and diachronic change (as proposed in this paper), or at the level of biological evolutionary change.

Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries

Abstract This paper argues that three widely accepted motivating factors subsumed under the broad heading of iconicity, namely iconicity of quantity, iconicity of complexity and iconicity of cohesion, in fact have no role in explaining grammatical asymmetries and should be discarded. The iconicity accounts of the relevant phenomena have been proposed by authorities like Jakobson, Haiman and Givón, but I argue that these linguists did not sufficiently consider alternative usage-based explanations in terms of frequency of use. A closer look shows that the well-known Zipfian effects of frequency of use (leading to shortness and fusion) can be made responsible for all of the alleged iconicity effects, and initial corpus data for a range of phenomena confirm the correctness of the approach.

Loanwords in the world's languages : a comparative handbook

This book is the first work to address the question of what kinds of words get borrowed in a systematic and comparative perspective. It studies lexical borrowing behavior on the basis of a world-wide sample of 40 languages, both major languages and minor languages, and both languages with heavy borrowing and languages with little lexical influence from other languages. The book is the result of a five-year project bringing together a unique group of specialists of many different languages and areas. The introductory chapters provide a general up-to-date introduction to language contact at the word level, as well as a presentation of the projects methodology. All the chapters are based on samples of 1000-2000 words, elicited by a uniform meaning list of 1460 meanings. The combined database, comprising over 70,000 words, is published online at the same time as the book is published. For each word, information about loanword status is given in the database, and the 40 case studies in the book describe the social and historical contact situations in detail. The final chapter draws general conclusions about what kinds of words tend to get borrowed, what kinds of word meanings are particularly resistant to borrowing, and what kinds of social contact situations lead to what kinds of borrowing situations.

Word-class-changing inflection and morphological theory

One of the most common claims made about the difference between inflection and derivation in the morphological literature is that derivational affixes change the word-class of their base, while inflectional affixes do not change the word-class. In this paper I argue that this view is wrong, and that important insights about the nature of inflection and derivation are lost if word-class-changing inflection is not recognized. In §2, I present a number of examples of word-class-changing inflection, and in §3–5 I discuss several potential objections to my analysis. I show that the cases in question can be regarded neither as word-class-changing derivation (§3–4) nor as non-word-class-changing inflection (§5), and that a description in terms of feature neutralization is not a general solution (§6). In §7 I argue that to account for the syntactic properties of words, two types of word-class have to be distinguished: lexeme word-class and word-form word-class. §8 discusses some problems that arise in the formal representation of this proposal in constituent-structure trees and observes that Tesniere’s dependency grammar provides an interesting perspective. Finally, §9 discusses the universal correlation between inflection and preservation of internal syntax, and derivation and the non-preservation of internal syntax.

Argument marking in ditransitive alignment types

In syntactic typology, the monotransitive alignment types, in particular accusativity and ergativity, have been a major topic of research in recent decades (see Dixon 1994 for an overview). The picture that is shown in (1) has become standard textbook wisdom. If we use the well-known role-prototypes S (single argument of intransitive verb), A (agent-like argument of transitive verb) and P (patient-like argument of transitive verb), we can say that if S and A are treated alike as opposed to P, we get accusative alignment (as in 1a); if all three are treated alike, we get neutral alignment (as in 1b); and if S and P are treated alike as opposed to A, we get ergative alignment (as in 1c).

FROM PURPOSIVE TO INFINITIVE ― A UNIVERSAL PATH OF GRAMMATICIZATION

According to a widespread view, the Infinitive is the basic and maximally unmarked form of the verb that carries no meaning of its own in addition to the meaning of the verb stem and that is therefore ideally suited for listing verbs in a dictionary, much like the nominative singular for nouns. This view can be found, for example, in Jakobsons influential 1957 article, and in two recent definitions froni dictionaries of linguistics:

Explaining article-possessor complementarity: economic motivation in noun phrase syntax.

In many languages the definite article cannot occur when a possessive phrase is present in the NP (e.g. English *the my book, *Johns the book). I argue that these patterns can be understood in terms of economic motivation because possessed NPs are very likely to be definite. A structural explanation in terms of a unique determiner position is insufficient to account for the full range of attested crosslinguistic patterns, and the universal generalizations that do seem to be valid can be derived from the economy-based explanation. Finally I show how the performance motivation of economy creates the competence pattern in diachronic change