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.

Were they al demonyak?†

In "The lady was al demonyak: historical aspects of Adverb all", Buchstaller and Traugott (B&T) consider the "development of the functions and structural properties of Adverb all, and suggest that degree modifiers in general should be analyzed in similar terms" (p. 345). They claim that the authors of CGEL mention "Adverb all as a ‘modifier in an AdvP’ that means ‘completely’, but do not subclassify it in their discussion of types of adverbs" (p. 345). The reason that all is not subclassified as a type of adverb is that it's not an adverb at all. It's a determinative.

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.