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"HASPELMATH, MARTIN"
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Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability
This paper claims that a wide variety of grammatical coding asymmetries can be explained as adaptations to the language users’ needs, in terms of frequency of use, predictability and coding efficiency. I claim that all grammatical oppositions involving a minimal meaning difference and a significant frequency difference are reflected in a universal coding asymmetry, i.e. a cross-linguistic pattern in which the less frequent member of the opposition gets special coding, unless the coding is uniformly explicit or uniformly zero. I give 25 examples of pairs of construction types, from a substantial range of grammatical domains. For some of them, the existing evidence from the world’s languages and from corpus counts is already strong, while for others, I know of no counterevidence and I make readily testable claims. I also discuss how the functional-adaptive forces operate in language change, and I discuss a number of possible alternative explanations.
Journal Article
Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies
In this discussion note, I argue that we need to distinguish carefully between descriptive categories, that is, categories of particular languages, and comparative concepts, which are used for crosslinguistic comparison and are specifically created by typologists for the purposes of comparison. Descriptive formal categories cannot be equated across languages because the criteria for category assignment are different from language to language. This old structuralist insight (called CATEGORIAL PARTICULARISM) has recently been emphasized again by several linguists, but the idea that linguists need to identify 'crosslinguistic categories' before they can compare languages is still widespread, especially (but not only) in generative linguistics. Instead, what we have to do (and normally do in practice) is to create comparative concepts that allow us to identify comparable phenomena across languages and to formulate crosslinguistic generalizations. Comparative concepts have to be universally applicable, so they can only be based on other universally applicable concepts: conceptual-semantic concepts, general formal concepts, and other comparative concepts. Comparative concepts are not always purely semantically based concepts, but outside of phonology they usually contain a semantic component. The fact that typologists compare languages in terms of a separate set of concepts that is not taxonomically superordinate to descriptive linguistic categories means that typology and language-particular analysis are more independent of each other than is often thought.
Journal Article
The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative Concept and Cross-linguistic Generalizations
1970年代以來，在非洲、大洋洲的語言以及世界上許多其他語言中已有關連動結構 的探討。以往硏究中的主要問題是：對連動結構的界定不清晰且過於寬鬆。因此，有一 些語言學家對於找到統一的連動結構的跨語言槪念感到絕望。Foley (2010:107)曾寫到： 「連動結構真的有放諸四海皆準的定義嗎？很可能沒有」以往關於連動結構硏究的這些 問題實質上都是源於混淆了比較用的槪念（Haspelmath 2010)和自然類。連動結構常被看 作自然類（普遍範疇），以致其他語言中具有不同性質的現象也被誤認爲連動結構。這 不可避免地導致對此槪念的理解過於廣泛而不準確。並且，此類「典型結構」無法證 僞。本硏究基於比較語言學和理論語言學的文獻，而非系統性的語言樣本。本硏究提出 連動結構的狹義定義，並且槪括出十項關於連動結構的通則
Journal Article
Universals of causative and anticausative verb formation and the spontaneity scale
In this paper, I formulate and explain a number of universal generalizations about the formation of causative verbs (overtly marked verbs with causal meaning) and anticausative verbs (overtly marked verbs with noncausal meaning). Given the “spontaneity scale” of basic verb meanings (transitive > unergative > automatic unaccusative > costly unaccusative > agentful), we can say that verb pairs with a noncausal verb higher on the scale tend to be causative pairs, and verb pairs with a noncausal verb lower on the scale tend to be anticausative pairs. I propose that these generalizations can be subsumed under form-frequency correspondence: That transitive base verbs tend to form causatives (often analytic causatives) is because they rarely occur in causal contexts, and the fact that unaccusative verbs tend to be coded as anticausatives is because they frequently occur in causal contexts, and special marking is required for the rarer and less expected situation.
Journal Article
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’.
Journal Article
Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics
The amount of available digital data for the languages of the world is constantly increasing. Unfortunately, most of the digital data are provided in a large variety of formats and therefore not amenable for comparison and re-use. The Cross-Linguistic Data Formats initiative proposes new standards for two basic types of data in historical and typological language comparison (word lists, structural datasets) and a framework to incorporate more data types (e.g. parallel texts, and dictionaries). The new specification for cross-linguistic data formats comes along with a software package for validation and manipulation, a basic ontology which links to more general frameworks, and usage examples of best practices.
Journal Article
An interview on linguistic variation with Martin Haspelmath
Martin Haspelmath, a professor at Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History whose work has focused on the areas of linguistic typology, linguistic variation, language contact, and syntactic and morphological theory, is interviewed.
Journal Article
Coding causal–noncausal verb alternations: A form–frequency correspondence explanation
We propose, and provide corpus-based support for, a usage-based explanation for cross-linguistic trends in the coding of causal–noncausal verb pairs, such as raise/rise, break (tr.)/break (intr.). While English mostly uses the same verb form both for the causal and the noncausal sense (labile coding), most languages have extra coding for the causal verb (causative coding) and/or for the noncausal verb (anticausative coding). Causative and anticausative coding is not randomly distributed (Haspelmath 1993): Some verb meanings, such as 'freeze', 'dry' and 'melt', tend to be coded as causatives, while others, such as 'break', 'open' and 'split', tend to be coded as anticausatives. We propose an explanation of these coding tendencies on the basis of the form–frequency correspondence principle, which is a general efficiency principle that is responsible for many grammatical asymmetries, ultimately grounded in predictability of frequently expressed meanings. In corpus data from seven languages, we find that verb pairs for which the noncausal member is more frequent tend to be coded as anticausatives, while verb pairs for which the causal member is more frequent tend to be coded as causatives. Our approach implies that linguists should not rely on form–meaning parallelism when trying to explain cross-linguistic or language-particular patterns in this domain.
Journal Article