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Linguistic Typology Bernhard Wälchli, Stockholm University

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Linguistic Typology Bernhard Wälchli, Stockholm University Linguistic Typology Bernhard Wälchli, Stockholm University Published in Latvian as Velhli B. "Tipoloģiskā valodniecība". Nacionālā enciklopēdija. https://enciklopedija.lv/skirklis/100075-tipoloģiskā-valodniecība (skatīts 02.10.2020) 1. Definition Linguistic typology is the empirical study of the structural diversity of the world’s human languages and of the mechanisms explaining it. In investigating language, typologists concentrate on claims about the structure of language that are cross- linguistically falsifiable, and typologists share the assumption that cross-linguistic evidence is fundamental for understanding the nature of human language. Like historical linguistics and areal linguistics, typology is a comparative approach to linguistics. However, while historical linguistics focuses on languages that are cognate (such as the languages of the Indo-European language family) and areal linguistics on languages spoken in the same geographical region (such as the South Asia), linguistic typology emphasizes the ontological similarity of all human languages and studies them as objects of the same kind, subject to the same kinds of cognitive conditions and discourse conditions. 2. Origin of the term The name typology is ascribed to Georg von der Gabelentz. The original idea was that investigating specific properties of a language would allow for determining its general character, its “type”. But most typologists now agree that most features of a language do not determine each other, languages are much more diverse. 3. Objects of study and major approaches Most typological studies consider one or several of the following issues: (i) Classification of a feature in a sample of the world’s languages. (For instance, the word order of Subject, Verb and Object: SOV, SVO, VSO, OSV, VOS, OVS or No dominant order) or the correlation of two or various features (for instance, how subject- verb-object word order correlates with the occurrence of prepositions or postpositions). (ii) The study of a particular feature in one or few languages from a typological perspective, for instance the study of posterior subordinate clauses in Latvian and Lithuanian. 1 (iii) The reconsideration of a fundamental issue in linguistic theory from a typological perspective. For instance, do all languages have nouns, verbs and adjectives? Do all languages have subjects or are there languages with purely semantic alignment (actors vs. undergoers). Typologists do not take traditional notions in language-specific grammar traditions for granted, but believe that fundamental notions in linguistics have to be constantly reconsidered from the perspective of new evidence from other languages. 4. Practical and theoretical relevance By convenience, many linguists study just their native language or just the most prestigious languages of the world. However, the object of linguistics is all languages. The need for massively cross-linguistic research in linguistics derives from the fact that no single human language is by itself representative for the diversity of structures attested in the world’s languages. Typological research has shown that the coexistence of features in particular languages is often accidental. Only by considering a large number of different language can we study how different elements in language structure relate to each other. Cross-linguistic comparison is, for instance, crucial for the study of semantics. All languages have language-specific categorizations that highlight certain distinctions while disregarding other distinctions. Typological research is in demand of a large number of high quality documentations and descriptions of most different languages of the world (many of which are heavily endangered). Descriptive linguists, however, profit from typological studies for more accurate descriptions of underdescribed languages. But even grammarians of well-described languages can highly profit from studying slightly different but similar structures in other entirely different languages, which yields new perspectives on familiar phenomena. The production of high quality documentations and descriptions can have in its turn the effect of elevating the status of endangered languages among its own speakers and assigning to it its true value as part of the cultural heritage of mankind. 5. Main divisions Typological research can be subdivided according to core areas of language structure into phonological typology (typology of sound inventories), morphological typology (morphology is the structure of words), typology of parts of speech, syntactic typology (how words are combined to sentences) and lexical typology (how crucial semantic fields are organized, such as color, perception, motion, or temperature; also called semantic typology). Syntactic typology can be further subdivided into word order typology, typology of the noun phrase, typology of the clause and typology of complex sentences. There is a strong bias toward the study of grammatical categories. Word formation (derivation and composition) has received little attention so far. Discourse plays a major role in typology since many researchers assume that structural entities in particular languages grammaticalize from discourse preferences. For instance, most languages have nouns and verbs since there must be something to talk about and something said about this. 2 6. Theoretical approaches Despite their differences, human natural languages are all in some ways similar and a major aim of typological research has been to identify non-trivial constraints in human language, what is universal in all human languages and what is a possible human language. Especially since Joseph Greenberg’s pioneering work in the 60s, a main interest of typological research has been the search for implicative universals and constraining hierarchies. Empirical research in cross-linguistic universals was boosted by Noam Chomsky’s entirely theoretical and controversial postulate of an innate Universal Grammar common for all natural languages. Many postulated universals are collected in the Konstanz Universals Archive (many of them have been falsified). In the 80s and 90s it became clear in Matthew Dryer’s work on word order correlations and Johanna Nichols’ research in major morphosyntactic categories that many structural features are distributed macro-areally. Put differently, the populations of languages in different continents differ structurally in statistically significant ways and there is a macro-areal cline Africa-Eurasia-Oceania-Americas reflecting human migration paths out of Africa. For instance, a large proportion of the languages in Oceania and indigenous American languages distinguish formally between expressions for ‘we (but not you)’ and ‘we (you included)’, which is rare in Africa and Europe. This areal-typological approach aims at approaching linguistic diversity (rather than universals) and models the emergence of cross-linguistic diversity in diachronic perspectives. It searches for statistic correlations rather than strict universals and it has been a major motivation for creating mapped databases such as WALS. The availability of typological databases has made it possible to compare linguistic structural features with exolinguistic factors such as population size. Contemporary research suggests that certain typological features correlate with population size and that certain complex structural features are overrepresented in languages with few speakers (and few non-native speakers). This line of research is also interested in creole languages, i.e. young languages that have not had time to accumulate much complexity, which are often excluded from areal-typological studies. 7. Major research methods In order to ascertain that we compare like with like, language-specific properties have to be analyzed in terms of cross-linguistic comparative concepts, which are often semantic. Typologists can, for instance, be interested in whether the semantic roles instrumental (e.g., to strike with a hammer) and comitative (e.g., to play with a friend) are expressed by different markers (as in Finnish and Swahili) or by the same markers (as in English and Latvian) irrespective of whether the markers involved are cases, prepositions, postpositions or a combination thereof (in Latvian preposition ar with accusative case in singular and dative case in plural). In order to assess which type is most common, data from a world-wide stratified sample of languages have to be compiled where no language family or area is overrepresented. While identical encoding of instrumental and comitative is most common in the languages of Europe, different encoding clearly prevails in the languages of the world. Encoding patterns for related 3 semantic domains can be arranged in so-called semantic maps, reflecting different recurrent polysemy-patterns in the languages of the world, as illustrated in Figure 1. verb coordination noun coordination comitative instrumental L a t v i a n a r + A C C / D A T predicative possessee S w a h i l i n a Figure 1: A semantic map. The functions noun-coordination (‘bread and fish’) and predicative possessee (the possessed element in a predicative possession construction) are illustrated in (1) from Swahili, where they are both expressed with the comitative preposition na ‘with’. Exemplification as in (1) is important in typological studies, and examples are glossed with lexical labels in English and grammatical abbreviations for grammatical categories (SG singular, PL plural, 3 third person, REL
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