Terminology and concepts

Linguistic terminology can be a thorny issue. One person's serial verb construction is another person's verbal compound, and one person's adjective is another person's verb. Grambank has its own set of comparative concepts (Haspelmath 2010) that are sometimes different from other conventions and established traditions. In the wiki article for each feature, we specify each comparative concept and we give examples to illustrate what each feature intends to capture.

Some frequently recurrent concepts have their own page. These are cross-referenced in the feature articles.

• Wordhood and phonological boundness
• Morphology
• Affixes and clitics
• Particles
• Agreement
• Indexing vs. pronouns
• Core arguments (S, A and P)
• Noun classifiers and noun classes
• Relative clauses
• Dedicated marking
• Obligatory marking
• Productivity
• Grammatical gender and other notions of gender

References

Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language 86(3). 663–687.