Hudson on Zwicky on heads

As you can see, I've been reading Hudson's on syntactic relations. In his 1987 paper, like the others, it’s hard to judge the arguments because I don’t have a view of the whole system that he's working in. As so many linguists do, he suggests a few items and leaves it to the reader to imagine the complete set he has in mind. Nevertheless, my impression is of very interested data, opportunistically deployed: lots of cherry picking going on here. Not that others don’t do the same. 

Hudson on "determiners"

In a 2004 paper, Dick Hudson casts doubt on the very idea of determiners. But like so many others, he appears to confound the idea of a category and a function.

An instance of category-function confusion

I worry about how so many arguments are built on faulty assumptions stemming from category-function confusion. Often it's the confounding of NPs and subjects. The thinking seems to be that NPs typically function as subjects ∴ all subjects are NPs. This is clearly a non-sequitur, but it's a pervasive one.