Welcome to the Grammaticon

The Grammaticon is a collection of grammatical comparative concept terms with definitions and links to other resources and comparative data collections such as WALS (The World Atlas of Language Structures) and Grambank.

Concepts

The Grammaticon contains several hundred English grammatical concept terms, with (retro-)definitions by Martin Haspelmath, and links to corresponding terms in the English Wikipedia, the SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, and Croft’s Comparative Concepts Database ( https://comparative-concepts.github.io/cc-database/cc-database.html; originally in the online appendix of Croft (2022).

In the definitions, a superscript circle (°) marks terms which are defined elsewhere in the Grammaticon (“defining concepts”). Each concept page also shows the “derived concepts” (which are defined with reference to it), as well as “related features”.

Features

The Grammaticon links hundreds of cross-linguistic datasets to the concept terms, from a range of cross-linguistic dataset collections such as WALS, Grambank and CrossGram. Each dataset is characterized by a “feature” (or “parameter”), on which there is information for a wide range of languages (dozens, and often hundreds). Each feature page offfers a definition of the feature, usually copied from the database, and sometimes with comments (“Relation to Grammaticon concepts”) on how exactly the feature’s definition relates to the Grammaticon concepts.

Collections

The “Collections” page lists the collections from which the features are taken, with brief descriptions. In addition to larger collections such as WALS, Grambank and APiCS, there are also smaller collections, e.g. contributions from CrossGram.

For most of the collections, not all features are included, because the Grammaticon focuses on grammatical type features, and some of the collections also include lexical features and/or cognate features.