complexity/referring to WALS chapters

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear Esa,

Please refer to individual chapters of WALS (World Atlas of Language 
Structures), not to WALS as a whole. WALS is an edited volume, not a 
monograph, so you cannot attribute claims made in individual chapters to 
the whole work. Moreover, it's very important to acknowledge the 
contributions of individual authors.

In your complexity paper, you say

"Notice also that WALS (= Haspelmath et al. 2005) finds it appropriate to
adopt the following position: : “less frequent inflectional methods like 
infixation,
tonal affixes, and stem changes [= ablaut] are ignored” (p. 110)"

Instead, you should have said:

"Notice also that Dryer (2005) finds it appropriate to adopt the 
following position: ..."

referring to Dryer 2005 (Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional 
Morphology, ch. 26 of WALS).

Sorry for insisting on this, but it's very important for large-scale 
collaborative works that the individual contributions are recognized as 
such.

Gretings,
Martin

Esa Itkonen schrieb:
> Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>
>
>