Martin KonviÄka (Freie UniversitĂ€t Berlin)* 1 Colorless green ideas In the opening pages of his Syntactic Structures (1957: 15)[1], Noam Chomsky demonstrates the independence of grammar (or syntax) from semantics by referring to the meaningless, yet grammatically well-formed â and…
Patrick Flack sdvig press Le Formalisme russe, Ă bien des Ă©gards, constitue un phĂ©nomĂšne paradoxal. Il a, câest bien connu, fourni les fondements dâune approche systĂ©matique de la littĂ©rature (ou du « langage poĂ©tique « ) et contribuĂ© Ă produire une grande partie…
Clara Stockigt University of Adelaide There is little correlation between the existence of a system of gender in Pama-Nyungan languages and the inclusion of a discussion of these systems under the heading “Gender” in early grammatical sources. Of the small…
Jean-Michel Fortis Laboratoire dâhistoire des thĂ©ories linguistiques, UniversitĂ© Paris-Diderot I find that what I most care for is beauty of form, whether in substance or, perhaps even more keenly, in spirit. A perfect style, a well-balanced system of philosophy, a…
Martin Haspelmath Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig While looking at a range of views by grammarians on word-class distinctions (noun, verb, adjective etc.) and word division in two recent papers (Haspelmath 2011; 2012a), I was struck by what…
Toon Van Hal University of Leuven Unlike the other posts to this blog, the present post is not intended as a contribution to learning. Its sole ambition is to open a discussion on a rather sensitive topic (which is not…
James McElvenny University of Sydney When it comes to expressing the ideas of our own day, the deficiencies of classical Latin appear with ruthless clarity: telephones and motor-cars and wireless have no room in Ciceronian Latin, and it will be…
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 