Under the title ‘Towards an IPA for morphosyntax’, Martin Haspelmath set himself and our field the challenging task of setting up a general vocabulary for morphosyntax. Just like we have a universal standard for representing sounds in the IPA, in this talk, Martin argued that we need an analogous set of conventions for morphosyntactic notion or terminology, an “IMA” – a set of definitions for some basic terms (such as “adjective”, “reflexive pronoun”, “serial verb construction”). This is desirable given the widespread terminological inconsistencies and uncertainties in the literature, but a hard task. Nevertheless, Martin suggests that this becomes much easier once one recognizes (i) that giving definitions of general terms is very different from finding the natural kinds of universal grammar, and (ii) that much of the confusing diversity of terminological usage comes from a premature conflation of language description and general grammar. A lively discussion followed, with plenty of food for thought!
