On the Linguistic Tower of Babel
Posted: December 17th, 2012, 2:36 pm
Martin Haspelmath, a linguistic typologist, has some thoughts about dealing the linguistic Tower of Babel or the swamp of linguistic terminology (choose your metaphor) here: http://dlc.hypotheses.org/332
Here is an excerpt:
Here is an excerpt:
I have sometimes wondered why terminological confusion arises again and again, despite our best efforts to be rigorous and comprehensible to our colleagues. It seems that it’s a combination of neophobia (avoidance of neologisms, for fear of appearing extravagant) and naive categorial universalism. When Fillmore (1968) developed a theory of the syntactic realization of semantic roles, he used the old term “case”, which was previously used in a much more restricted way. Why didn’t he introduce a novel term for a novel concept? Fillmore apparently thought that people would be more willing to accept his new ideas if he didn’t scare them by using a new term (and maybe he was right). But he also thought that “deep case” in his sense was a universal innate category, and that the surface variations in its realization were not important. So from this universalist position, it makes perfect sense to ask: “How is case expressed in English, or in Mandarin?”