Martin Haspelmath: Four stereotypes that have guided morphosyntactic thinking

Thinking about language structures is made difficult not only by their incredible complexity, but also by entrenched ways of thinking about grammatical and lexical patterns. Linguists do not investigate languages in fresh way, but against the background (and often on the basis) of a centuries-old tradition.

Could it be that these traditional and stereotypical ways of thinking sometimes get in the way of approaching our objects of study in a fair way? Few linguists would deny this possibility, so here I will list four ways in which this may have adversely affected morphosyntactic descriptions and general theories:

– the word stereotype (1)

– the grammar/dictionary stereotype (2)

– the building-block stereotype (3)

– the speaker directionality stereotype (4)

My really bad TLDR: words don't exist, grammar is like words and words are like grammar, language isn't done by putting things one after the other, and we study too much how we make language and not enough how we make sense of language. Bonus sub-point: we like to say A is made of B but we could also say B is made of A.