[Lingtyp] Moods and non-finites?

[Adam James Ross Tallman]

Dear Cristian and everyone,

Read the comments more carefully before replying because I did not say nor
imply that the concept should be dispensed with.

Adam

On Sat, Jul 15, 2023 at 12:46 PM Christian Lehmann <
christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:

> 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
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-- 
Adam J.R. Tallman
Post-doctoral Researcher
Friedrich Schiller Universität
Department of English Studies
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