How much do languages differ and how similar are languages? An early attempt to consider these questions was a conference on language universals held in New York in 1961. Papers based on those prepared for the conference were published in 1963 in Universals of Language, edited by Joseph H Greenberg. (a 2nd, paperback, edition, appeared…… Continue reading Greenberg’s list of universals
Tag: Inflection: nouns
Revisiting Jane’s and my visit
I have posted before about the difficulty of forming a genitive from the co-ordinated phrase Jane and I, for example to talk about a visit by Jane and me. Odd gap in the English genitive – Language Miscellany I reviewed there several ways of trying to do that. I said that I found the following…… Continue reading Revisiting Jane’s and my visit
What is a word?
Ordinary people and linguist talk about words all the time, but it is surprisingly difficult to define what a word is. In a recent open access paper in the journal Word, the linguist Martin Haspelmath has had a go. The paper is Defining the word, Martin Haspelmath (2023), WORD, 69(3), 283–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2023.2237272 Proposed definition of word…… Continue reading What is a word?
Borrowing verb forms from another verb
Sometimes, an inflected form of a verb was originally an inflected form of another verb. For example, went, the past tense form of the English verb go was originally the past tense of the now obsolescent verb wend. This phenomenon is called suppletion. One striking example of suppletion occurs in the verb meaning ‘go’ in…… Continue reading Borrowing verb forms from another verb
Saxon Genitive
English has two common ways of expressing possession: the ‘Saxon genitive’ form adds -’s to the end of the last word in a noun phrase referring to the possessor:the king’s wifethe King of England’s wifethe man over there’s wifeFor more on the Saxon Genitive, please see Does English really have case? – Language Miscellany the…… Continue reading Saxon Genitive