Data from natural languages (in contrast to, say, the results of psycholinguistic experiments) are still a major source of evidence used in linguistics, whether they are elicited through grammatical judgments, as in generative linguistics, or by collecting samples, as preferred in typology. The underlying assumption is that data are alike in their value as evidence if they occur in natural languages. The present paper questions this assumption in showing that there is a difference in the naturalness of languages because languages like German or English have originally emerged as secondarily learned written languages, that is they once were languages without native speakers. Although they are nowadays acquired as first languages, their grammars still contain inconsistent properties which partly disqualify standard languages as a source of evidence.
2020. Polarization and the Emergence of a Written Marker. A Diachronic Corpus Study of the Adnominal Genitive in German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 32:2 ► pp. 145 ff.
Pickl, Simon
2020. Factors of selection, standard universals, and the standardisation of German relativisers. Language Policy 19:2 ► pp. 235 ff.
Van de Velde, Freek
2019. Wayward categorial shift: so odd an article. Language Sciences 73 ► pp. 146 ff.
2009. THE EVOLVING CONTEXT OF THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE HYPOTHESIS. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 31:2 ► pp. 175 ff.
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