Abstract
In his book Are some languages better than others?, the leading linguist R.M.W. Dixon put forward what we refer to as ‘Dixon’s dangerous idea’, i.e. the idea that linguistics should evaluate the relative worth of languages and provide some general criteria for deciding whether certain languages can be taken to be better or worse than others. Although it is obviously licit to raise this question, Dixon’s arguments when answering it are inaccurate, thus spreading a dangerous idea. This article critically discusses Dixon’s proposals and shows how his arguments draw on arbitrary and decontextualized criteria, and on naive evolutionary ideas of absolute fitness.
Funding source: Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness
Award Identifier / Grant number: FFI2017-87699-P
Funding source: Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities
Award Identifier / Grant number: PGC2018-096550-B-100
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to three anonymous Folia Linguistica reviewers and Guillermo Lorenzo for their insightful suggestions, and Olga Fischer and Sune Gregersen for their discerning comments and editorial support.
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Research funding: Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Grant FFI2017-87699-P (Víctor M. Longa); and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Grant PGC2018-096550-B-100 (Juan J. López-Rivera).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- How do middle voice markers and valency reducing constructions interact? Typological tendencies and diachronic considerations
- The acoustics of plosives and the formation of prosodic structure in Polish
- Bi-absolutive constructions in Chechen
- Giving voice to space: the grammar of Northern Alta spatial roots
- Grammatically unstable placeholders and morpho-syntactic remedies: evidence from East Asian languages
- Nonconvergence toward the standard: the maintenance of a distinctive use of rhotics among the Santomean diaspora in Portugal
- Discussion
- Adpositions and their distribution: a reply to Zygmunt Frajzyngier’s ‘Toward a functional typology of adpositions: theoretical implications’
- Meaning encoded in the grammatical system: a rejoinder
- Review Article
- On Dixon’s ‘dangerous idea’
- Book Reviews
- Tibor Laczkó: Lexicalising clausal syntax: The interaction of syntax, the lexicon and information structure in Hungarian
- Juho Ruohonen and Juhani Rudanko: Infinitival vs gerundial complementation with afraid, accustomed, and prone: Multivariate corpus studies
- Laura Becker: Articles in the world’s languages
- Ana Werkmann Horvat: Layers of modality: On double modal constructions by the example of Croatian
- Veronika Hegedűs & Katalin É. Kiss (eds.): Syntax of Hungarian: postpositions and postpositional phrases
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- How do middle voice markers and valency reducing constructions interact? Typological tendencies and diachronic considerations
- The acoustics of plosives and the formation of prosodic structure in Polish
- Bi-absolutive constructions in Chechen
- Giving voice to space: the grammar of Northern Alta spatial roots
- Grammatically unstable placeholders and morpho-syntactic remedies: evidence from East Asian languages
- Nonconvergence toward the standard: the maintenance of a distinctive use of rhotics among the Santomean diaspora in Portugal
- Discussion
- Adpositions and their distribution: a reply to Zygmunt Frajzyngier’s ‘Toward a functional typology of adpositions: theoretical implications’
- Meaning encoded in the grammatical system: a rejoinder
- Review Article
- On Dixon’s ‘dangerous idea’
- Book Reviews
- Tibor Laczkó: Lexicalising clausal syntax: The interaction of syntax, the lexicon and information structure in Hungarian
- Juho Ruohonen and Juhani Rudanko: Infinitival vs gerundial complementation with afraid, accustomed, and prone: Multivariate corpus studies
- Laura Becker: Articles in the world’s languages
- Ana Werkmann Horvat: Layers of modality: On double modal constructions by the example of Croatian
- Veronika Hegedűs & Katalin É. Kiss (eds.): Syntax of Hungarian: postpositions and postpositional phrases