Towards standardization of morphosyntactic terminology for general linguistics

This paper proposes that just like phonologists, linguists working on morphosyntax should have a core set of standard terms that are understood in exactly the same way across the discipline. Most of these terms are traditional terms that are given a standard retro-definition, because linguists already behave as if these terms had the same meaning for everyone. The definitions are definitions of general concepts (i.e. comparative concepts, applicable to all languages in exactly the same way), but they are expected to be highly similar to language-particular categories with the same labels. If linguists were close to finding out the true naturalkind categories of Human Language that all grammars consist of, there would be no need for definitions, but since this seems to be a remote goal, research on general linguistics must rely on uniformly defined general terms. 1. Terminological consistency and standardization Standardization has proved highly beneficial in many domains of technology and trade, and it is impossible to imagine today’s world without worldwide standards for basic units of time and space (the International System of Units, the Coordinated Universal Time, and others). In addition to such practical standards that ensure technological interoperability, there are also standard nomenclatures in many fields of science that affect how scientists talk about their subject domain. Biologists have had generally accepted conventions for naming species since the 18th century, and chemists started to organize terminological standards in the 1860s. Linguists have had a standard for representing general phonetic categories of segments since the 1890s: what is now known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In this paper, I would like to make the case for a morphosyntactic counterpart of the IPA: a standard set of morphosyntactic terms for general linguistics. If such a standard were possible, its advantages should be evident to every linguist who has had more than a few years of experience in the field. Many terms in linguistics are used in a variety of ways that are often confusing, and unless one is a specialist in a particular area, one may be unaware of these ambiguities. As a result, automatic literature search is often problematic or impossible, and unfortunately, there is also quite a bit of incomprehension and talking past each other. A widespread attitude in the field seems to be that the difficulties of our subject matter – the enormous complexities of the many different language systems that linguists are grappling with – make it impossible to have a standard terminology, at least at the present stage of our knowledge. It is this