Humans Who Read Grammars

Hello everyone, This posts serves to show non-generativist readers of this blog things going on in the generative sphere that they might like to know about. Mainly: grand challenges, the future of the field comparisons between genetic research into human history and historical linguistics large cross-linguistic databases Sometime ago, we wrote about the conference that was held in Athens in 2015 titled: Generative Syntax in the Twenty-First Century: The Road Ahead It was a conference that gathered many people and were very important matters were discussed, matters that are relevant both to those who describe themselves as "generativists" and those of us who don't. They had a round-table discussion, and the discussants also submitted written statements prior to the event. These can still be accessed and read, and provide insights into what people consider as crucial issues. Some of the links to these files had since broken, I contacted one of the o...

Read this piece by Christiansen & Chater on a new emergent field of study that integrates different sub-disciplines of language sciences. See also:  Can we get to the post-generativist-vs-functionalist-war generation yet?  ( - I'm bored with the conflicts of my elders) and Grand challenges of current linguistics

This is a blogpost about the way that different linguists see the great challenges and aims of linguistics, it's full of quotes that I hope will prove illustrative. The quotes are taken mainly from here   and here , you can also go there to read more. As usual, you're more than free to skim and scroll, there's quite a few quotes this time. On this blog we're interested in discussing  what the "Big Research Questions" in linguistics  are, and also we've been interested in getting past the functional-fenerative divide that often is very destructive.  Two of our readers even commented that the inflammatory "debates" of the Great War are "profoundly unattractive" and that they had left that part of linguistics intentionally because of it's unproductive nature. Here's Haspelmath describing the situation: It is not hard to see that linguists who work on linguistic diversity tend to fa ll into two very rough sociological g...

The World Atlas of Universal Grammar is an ongoing project documenting features of languages, by a team of more than eight authors.   Each feature is a structural property that describes one aspect of cross-linguistic homogeneity.   A feature has between 0 and 87178291200 values, shown by different colours on the maps.  Here is a sample of the features listed by author. Steven Pinker Does the language reverse the order of words in a sentence to form a question? Yes       No Does the language employ musical melodies for words and major/minor keys for polarity? Yes       No Is the language made up only of two-word utterances, with larger compositional meanings deduced from pragmatics? Yes       No Is it the ‘language’ of bee dance? Yes       No Does the language specify grammatical relations not in terms of agent and patient, but in term...