Course Description
In this advanced course, I will present and discuss proposals for a wide range of empirical universals of grammar and lexicon, asking to what extent they are explained by processes of cultural evolution, or by cognitive factors. There has long been a tension between these: Some linguists (especially formal linguists in the Chomskyan tradition) have put a strong emphasis on biocognitive explanations, while other linguists (especially functionalists in the Jespersen/Greenberg tradition) have taken a primary interest in cultural-evolutionary explanations. We will examine a range of specific universals of grammar and lexicon (especially but not only from the domains of argument marking, voice marking, and anaphora), both from a perspective of efficiency-driven cultural evolution and from the perspective of innate building blocks that put biocognitive constraints on grammars. I will also embed these issues in a broader quasi-philosophical context and I will ask what it means to provide theoretical descriptions, analyses and explanations of language structures. I will suggest that there is no need to choose a particular ideological “camp”, and that some of the differences between approaches may have to do with personal styles rather than with competing commitments.
Area Tags: Diachrony, Linguistic Frameworks, Morphology, Syntax, Typology
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30am – 11:50am
Location: ILC N101
Instructor: Martin Haspelmath
Martin Haspelmath is a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Honorary Professor at the University of Leipzig. His research interests are primarily in the area of broadly comparative and diachronic morphosyntax (Indefinite pronouns, 1997; From space to time, 1997; Understanding morphology, 2002) and in language contact (Loanwords in the world’s languages, co-edited with Uri Tadmor, 2009). He is one of the editors of Oxford University Press’s World Atlas of Language Structures (2005). He is well-known for his work on the conceptual foundations of comparative grammar (“Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies”, Language 2010).
