Syntactic theories – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
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Making room for new construction grammarians
August 29, 2024
In my mail this morning, from Research Gate, the text of Laura A. Michaelis’s long and rich “Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive: How to make room for the next generation of construction grammarians”, in the John Benjamins journal Constructions and Frames 16.2 (August 2024) — in part an homage to Chuck Fillmore (Charles J. Fillmore, 1929 – 2014), but primarily a development of his ideas. And there, in the middle of the abstract, was a reference to my 1994 Berkeley Linguistics Society paper “Dealing out meaning” (available on-line here), which LM calls my “classic paper” in her article (Chuck himself liked it a lot, but mostly it seemed to have gone without citation, so I thought it had been largely forgotten).
(the Research Gate PDF of LM’s text can be accessed here)
The abstract:
Posted in Constructions, Linguists, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntactic theories, Syntax | 2 Comments »
Research papers
May 7, 2021
It started in late April with Randall Munroe’s wry xkcd cartoon #2456, “Types of Scientific Paper”:
(#1)
Though the cartoon is primarily gentle ridicule of the natural sciences, some of the topics are applicable to the social sciences as well: My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it; Some thoughts on how everyone else is bad at research. And several are adaptable to linguistics with only small changes: Check out this weird thing one of us heard while out for a walk; We ran experiments on some undergraduates.
The xkcd cartoon immediately set off an avalanche of variants in various specific fields, including at least two in areas of linguistics: Indo-European studies and syntax.
Posted in Historical linguistics, Linguistics in the comics, Syntactic theories, Syntax | Leave a Comment »