[Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?

[Christian Lehmann]

Dear Adam and everybody,

just a brief reply to this:
>
> For a functional-typological audience, I'm sort of surprised the 
> distinction is still brought up as if it was discrete (or not just a 
> matter of definition as Martin points out), since Bybee discussed the 
> issue of inflectional status as a continuum with lexical/derivational 
> in her Morphology book some 30+ years ago. It's also well-known that 
> these notions of inflection/finiteness are tricky or nonapplicable in 
> many so-called polysynthetic languages (e.g. de Reuse 2009).
It is a recurrent misunderstanding among typologists, chiefly of 
particularist persuasion, that a grammatical concept should be dispensed 
with because it is not discrete, covers a continuum, is not applicable 
to all languages or what not. If one takes this position, then *no* 
grammatical concept whatsoever can be used in the description of more 
than one language. It seems more realistic, and even methodologically 
more fruitful, to live by concepts whose cross-linguistic application is 
"tricky".
-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20230715/e114ea5a/attachment.htm>