Blog Archives

Grammaticalisation clines: a brief conceptual history

Martin Konvička Freie Universität Berlin 1 Grammaticalisation clines In this blog post, I will sketch the history of grammaticalisation clines. Hopper and Traugott (2003: 6) understand this concept as “a metaphor for the empirical observation that cross-linguistically forms tend to undergo

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Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Linguistics, Typology

Typology – a new task of linguistics

James McElvenny University of Edinburgh In lieu of an introduction Below I offer an English translation of the last essay Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) personally submitted for publication, “Hypologie [Typologie] der Sprachen, eine neue Aufgabe der Linguistik”. This essay

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Posted in 19th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics, Typology

(Non-)universality of word-classes and words: The mid-20th century shift

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

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Posted in 20th century, Article, History, Linguistics, Typology, Uncategorized

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