In the following interview, Annemarie Verkerk and Russell Gray answer Martin Haspelmath’s questions about their paper “Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses” (Verkerk et al. 2025) Martin: Congratulations on this new paper on grammatical universals based on the Grambank data! My first question is whether you were…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 04/08/2026
· Last modified 04/27/2026
In early April 1989, the international “Cognitive Linguistics” movement was born. Probably not everyone knows that it has a precise birthday, so let me recount the event here from my own perspective – because, amazingly, I was an eyewitness as a student. And I interviewed the famous George Lakoff, together…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 01/11/2026
· Last modified 01/12/2026
Since Plank (1991), syncretic patterns in inflectional paradigms have been studied in a sustained way, fuelled also by the increasing popularity of Distributed Morphology (e.g. Siddiqi 2019) and nanosyntax (Caha 2009; Baunaz et al. 2018). Consider a German inflectional paradigm such as the following: Many linguists would say that the…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 11/20/2025
· Last modified 11/28/2025
“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”?…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 10/28/2025
· Last modified 10/31/2025
One important concept in all discussions of nonverbal clause constructions (or “non-verbal predication”) is the term “copula” – but what exactly is a copula? Here I continue the discussion of Creissels et al. (2016) (following an earlier blogpost), who distinguish between four strategies (“formal types”) of “predicative marking” in such…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 10/14/2025
· Last modified 11/28/2025
This autumn, De Gruyter’s “Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics” was enriched by another voluminous work: “Non-verbal predication in the world’s languages”, in two volumes with over 1200 pages, edited by Pier Marco Bertinetto, Luca Ciucci, and Denis Creissels. I was particularly interested in this volume because I wrote a paper on…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 02/20/2025
· Last modified 02/21/2025
[A guest post by Noam Faust] This post is written with the goal of finding patterns that are predicted by formal analyses, but possibly do not exist. If they really do not exist, one might ask why. The issue is important to me in light of an upcoming invitation to…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 10/13/2024
· Last modified 10/28/2024
Semantic typology is based on semantic comparative concepts (or comparison meanings, as I have come to call them), and these concepts usually have labels that come from a particular language. Thus, the Concepticon, a systematic list of 3971 comparison meanings for word comparison, uses English labels for its comparative concepts.…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 05/18/2024
· Last modified 05/31/2024
Syntax textbooks often emphasize that word classes must be identified by grammatical tests, rather than by their meanings – in contrast to traditional school grammars and basic pedagogical texts, which often still say, for example, that “Nouns are a part of speech that indicate people, places, things, or ideas“. Here…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 05/12/2024
· Last modified 05/21/2024
The terms lexicon and lexical have a range of different meanings in linguistics, and I have been wondering whether they could perhaps be replaced by something better. Thus, in the spirit of my 2006 paper against markedness, I now distinguish four senses of the traditional term “lexical (item)” (in a…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 02/19/2024
· Last modified 02/23/2024
Structural analyses of grammatical patterns are often non-unique, as was classically observed by Chao (1934): Different analyses often work equally well, to all appearances. This would not be a problem if linguists did not typically work with the background assumption that there is only one true analysis, which will lead…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 01/08/2024
· Last modified 02/19/2024
My paper on inflection and derivation as traditional comparative concepts has just been published (in Linguistics, in open access, 2024). What made me revisit this old question? (which had occupied me back in 1996, and of course in my 2002 morphology textbook, Chapter 4) Linguists have many technical terms that they rely on in their everyday work,…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 01/05/2024
· Last modified 01/10/2024
My paper on inflection and derivation as traditional comparative concepts has just been published (in Linguistics, in open access, 2024). What made me revisit this old question? (which had occupied me back in 1996, and of course in my 2002 morphology textbook, Chapter 4) Linguists have many technical terms that…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 02/28/2023
· Last modified 04/07/2023
Almost as well-known as Jespersen’s Cycle is “Givón’s Cycle”, the change from independent personal pronoun to grammatical person marker (= person index) to zero, with subsequent renewal: Givon’s Cycle (so dubbed by Seržant 2021): independent personal pronoun > subject index > zero > [renewal…] Givón’s (1976) article is one of…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 02/26/2023
· Last modified 04/07/2023
It is a widespread stereotype that cliticization is an intermediate stage between free lexeme and affix status, and many overview texts and textbooks present a scale such as the following: content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix (> Ø) For example, Spencer & Luís (2012: §2.1) say…
Martin Haspelmath · Diversity Linguistics Comment
by Martin Haspelmath · Published 02/26/2023
· Last modified 04/07/2023
It is a widespread stereotype that cliticization is an intermediate stage between free lexeme and affix status, and many overview texts and textbooks present a scale such as the following: content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix (> Ø) For example, Spencer & Luís (2012: §2.1) say…
