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In:Linguistic Categories, Language Description and Linguistic Typology
Edited by Luca Alfieri, Giorgio Francesco Arcodia and Paolo Ramat
[Typological Studies in Language 132] 2021
► pp. 35–58

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Chapter 2
Towards standardization of morphosyntactic terminology for general linguistics

 | MPI-SHH Jena | Leipzig University
Published online: 9 July 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.132.02has
This paper proposes that just like phonologists, linguists working on morphosyntax should have a core set of standard terms that are understood in exactly the same way across the discipline. Most of these terms are traditional terms that are given a standard retro-definition, because linguists already behave as if these terms had the same meaning for everyone. The definitions are definitions of general concepts (i.e. comparative concepts, applicable to all languages in exactly the same way), but they are expected to be highly similar to language-particular categories with the same labels. If linguists were close to finding out the true natural-kind categories of Human Language that all grammars consist of, there would be no need for definitions, but since this seems to be a remote goal, research on general linguistics must rely on uniformly defined general terms.
Article outline
  • 1.Terminological consistency and standardization
  • 2.Comparative concepts, language-particular categories, and natural kinds
  • 3.Examples of possible standard definitions of well-known terms
  • 4.Principles for standard morphosyntactic terms
  • 5.Shared-core definitions of comparative concepts
  • 6.Stereotypes and prototypes
  • 7.Standard comparative terms and language-particular description
  • 8.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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