Trends and labels

[Martin Haspelmath]

Brian MacWhinney wrote:
> One worries that some crucial pair could be missing.  So, you can see a clear decline in “generative grammar” but maybe that was because terminology shifted to “Universal grammar”, but that was also in decline and “transformational grammar” is nearing extinction.  But, still, maybe there is some term in the formalist literature that is on the rise and we are just missing it.
What I think has happened over the last 15 years is that generative 
grammarians increasingly just take their approach as default and don't 
label it at all. For example, the journal "Syntax" just published 
hard-core generative syntax, and likewise for the Blackwell "Handbook of 
contemporary syntactic theory".

This may not be very scientific, but it seems to work. So maybe it will 
be a good sign if at some time in the future, the Ngram viewer shows a 
drop in labels like "cognitive/functional linguistics", because we don't 
have to label our approach anymore.

Season's Greetings,
Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de  <mailto:haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616