Trends and labels

[Arie Verhagen]

Both Brian's and Martin's points are well taken. "Minimalist program" 
has become a new specific term used in formalist circles over the last 
two decades (plot it against "construction grammar", from 1990 till 2008 
- hopeful trend?). Or take "theoretical linguistics" as another GENERAL 
term appropriated by formalists (plot it against "corpus linguistics", 
from 1980 till 2008).

Happy holidays,
--Arie Verhagen

------ Original Message ------
From: Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>
Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2013 06:29:03 +0100
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Trends and labels

> 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
>