"Diversity Linguistics Blog" is a multi-author blog that discusses current issues in language typology and language description. It is written by a team of linguists for other linguists. The notion of "diversity linguistics" recognizes the close connections between the enterprises of language comparison and analysis of particular languages. Topics include grammatical structures (syntax and morphology, phonology), language contact, language change in a comparative perspective, and genealogical linguistics. New authors are always welcome.
Serial verb constructions: A critical assessment of Haspelmath's interpretation by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (The following was originally written as a letter to the editor of the journal Language and Linguistics, where Haspelmath (2016) was published; L&L declined to publish it, so...
When I had lunch with two phoneticians the other day, the question came up whether there is a correlation between the size of the phoneme inventory of a language and its population size. Neither of us knew, and we started to speculate in which direction it should go. My guess was that larger languag...
Over the last decade, I have often argued that grammatical coding patterns can be explained by frequency of use. In this blogpost, I provide a short summary of the claims for those who are not familiar with the argument. What I’m claiming is not that I can explain language-particular patterns – the...
The Yale economist Keith Chen has made quite a stir by his claim that there is a connection between grammatical marking of the future and future-related behavior: in short, that speakers of languages which mark the future save less and care less about their health. The purported explanation is that...
In his recent post on this blog, Simeon Floyd takes exception with my characterization of his 2011 Linguistic Typology paper as “asking a wrong question”. He emphasizes that the main point of his paper is to clarify what Quechua is like, not how to call the categories, and that in general it is not...
Linguists have their catalogue of languages, biologists are working on their catalogue of species, and chemists have their catalogue (“periodic system”) of elements. Full inventorization is clearly a desirable goal of science, and some kind of order in the phenomena is a prerequisite for deeper unde...
Last week I was at one of the most unusual and stimulating events I’ve attended in a long time – a workshop on “Variation and universals” organized by Roberta D’Alessandro and Marc van Oostendorp, bringing together syntacticians and phonologists, macrotypologists and microvariantionists, and generat...
Linguists treat many technical terms as so well-established that they are not in need of explanation or definition, or that any further discussion is a secondary matter. But even a widely used term such as “word” is not well-understood (Haspelmath 2011), so it is not surprising that more specialized...
Based on my experiences in the Stanford Universals Project in 1969-76, it seems to me that the substance and goals of language-typological research were the same then as they are today: the study of the distribution of structural characteristics across languages and in particular, the search for cro...
I am often asked to review a paper for an edited volume (or special issue of a journal), but I am generally reluctant to do this, for reasons that take a little more space to explain. So here’s why. (This blog post is of course of more general relevance than the general theme of diversity linguistic...
The following is a summary of an invited talk I presented at NoSLiP 2018 in Oslo in February 2018. I used the subtitle “Toward an IPA of morphosyntax”, echoing some remarks of an earlier post, though this is still a fairly distant goal. But in this talk I say more to motivate the need for it. 1. The...
(The following conversation reflects some of the discussions that we had over the last few years, and particularly at a recent mini-workshop at WIKO Berlin.) Martin Haspelmath: In the typological literature of the last decade, one finds more and more instances of people claiming that this or that t...
In a recent paper on word classes, Haspelmath (2012a) takes field linguists to task for asking the “wrong questions,” like whether the major word classes are universal or present in a particular language. The problem with this claim is that the field linguists he cites are not asking these questions...
Quite a few people have argued in recent times that typological distributions should be explained with reference to diachronic change (e.g. Bybee (1988; 2006; 2008), Blevins (2004), Anderson (2005; 2016), (Plank 2007), Creissels (2008), and Cristofaro (2010; 2013; 2014)). As Bickel et al. (2015: 29)...
I was happy to see the recent methodological article in the (online-only) “Perspectives” section of Language by Henry Davis, Carrie Gillon and Lisa Matthewson: “How to investigate linguistic diversity: Lessons from the Pacific Northwest”. The three authors (henceforth, DG&M) defend the approach of t...