Author’s Reply - Cross-linguistic Generic Categories Are Linguists’ Generalizations

Semantic Maps and the Identification of Cross-Linguistic Generic Categories: Evidentiality and its Relation to Epistemic Modality

Cross-linguistic generic categories like evidentiality, tense, aspect, number, and person are entrenched in linguistic theory. However, it is not clear whether there is much empirical substance to them. There is a remarkable lack of criteria for what counts as a category. This paper tries to show that semantic maps can be used to give empirical substance to claims about cross-linguistic generic...

Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies

In this paper I argue that cross-linguistic grammatical comparison cannot be based on grammatical categories, because these are language-specific. Instead, typology must be (and usually is) based on a special set of comparative concepts that are specifically created by typologists for the purposes of comparison. Descriptive formal categories cannot be equated across languages because the criter...

Commentary on Boye - Posting Grammatical Categories: Linguists’ vs. Speakers’ Generalizations

Descriptive scales versus comparative scales

In this paper, I show that scales (or hierarchies) have been appealed to in various functions: They have been used to formulate descriptive generalizations (on a single language), and to formulate cross-linguistic generalizations. They have also been used for binary relations, and for implicational relations among more than two items on the scale. This yields four uses of scales (descriptive re...

Conceptual and linguistic distinctions between singular and plural generics

Prasada and Dillingham (2006, 2009) and Leslie (2007, 2008) hypothesize that ‘bare plural’ generics (e.g. “tigers are striped”) are used to express a range of conceptually different types of generalizations. We investigate whether different syntactic forms of generics are restricted to expressing only some of these types of generalizations, and if so, which ones. In doing so, we also test the r...