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Home , Joseph Greenberg, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics (journal), Linguistic typology, Morphological typology, Studies in Language

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 and of the mechanisms explaining it. In investigating , 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 and areal linguistics, typology is a comparative approach to linguistics. However, while 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, to the same kinds of cognitive conditions and discourse conditions.

2. Origin of the term The 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 order of Subject, and : SOV, SVO, VSO, OSV, VOS, OVS or No dominant order) or the correlation of two or various features (for instance, how subject- verb-object 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.

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(iii) The reconsideration of a fundamental issue in linguistic theory from a typological perspective. For instance, do all languages have , 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 . 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), ( is the structure of ), typology of parts of , 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 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.

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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 ’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 ’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--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 relative). – the smallest segments bearing meaning within words – are separated by hyphens in glosses. numbers in (1) stand for what Africanists call “noun classes”. For typologists, noun classes in African languages and gender in Indo-European languages are instances of the same cross- linguistic type of phenomenon despite the difference in terminology, as they largely exhibit the same kind of behavior ( induced by nouns).

(1) Swahili (Niger-Congo; Bantu) ...m-toto m-moja aliye na mi-kate mi-tano... na samaki wa-wili I.SG-boy I.SG-one 3SG-be.REL-I with II.PL-bread II.PL-five with fish(I.PL) I.PL-two ‘...a boy who has five...loaves and two fish’

Glossing allows typologists to work with language data from a large number of different languages at the same time. The most important data sources for collecting typological databases are reference (in many modern reference grammars, examples are already glossed), data from questionnaires, original texts or translations (so-called parallel texts; as (1) from the Bible translation).

8. History and some of the most important researchers Like historical linguistics, linguistic typology has its origin in the Romantic movement in the 19th century. In this tradition, languages are considered to be organisms and ascribed holistic stages (isolating, agglutinative, fusional or polysynthetic) mainly based on morphological characteristics (with Wilhelm von Humboldt as a leading exponent). The study of the world’s languages received a major boost by the American anthropologist tradition instigated by and by American (, Leonard Bloomfield and others) and later by a similar descriptive

4 movement in Australia ( and later R.W.M. Dixon and others). started by Prague structuralism in the 30s (Nikolaj. S. Trubetzkoy, ) was a first theoretically oriented movement making use of massive cross-linguistic comparison. The father of modern typology is Joseph Greenberg who started the systematic study of the interrelationship between various typological features, notably the study of word order typologies, and formulated a large number of implicational universals. Greenberg’s tradition was continued in the US by scholars such as Edith Moravcsik, Talmy Givón, , William Croft and Matthew Dryer. In the Soviet Union, major impulses came from the Moscow school (Aleksandr Kibrik) and the Leningrad school (Vladimir Nedjalkov), many leading western typologists, such as Johanna Nichols and Greville Corbett, received major impulses from Russian typology. In Germany, Cologne was an important center for typological research (Hansjakob Seiler, Bernd Heine, Christian Lehmann). In Italy, the dominant center is Pavia (Paolo Raamat). Important impulses also came from Dutch (Leon Stassen) and Swedish linguistics (Östen Dahl, Åke Viberg). Typology started to be a world-wide organized movement by the foundation of the Association for Linguistic Typology and the journal Linguistic Typology (1997-) with Frans Plank (Konstanz) as the founding editor (now Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Stockholm). Many important projects were launched by the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Bernard Comrie, Martin Haspelmath, David Gil), notably the World Atlas of Language Structures, one of the first large scale typological databases.

9. Current developments Recently, statistical and other quantitative approaches have become very important in typology as the common effort to compile large databases but also the growing availability of electronic text corpora calls for more efficient data processing. Another line of research is to combine linguistic typology with the study of language-internal variation (dialects, sociolects, spoken vs. written modality, style and register). As there is a growing awareness that sign languages (both urban and rural) are as much complete languages as spoken languages, there is an increasing interest in typology. But typologists also make increasingly use of neurolinguistic methods, designing experiments that investigate specific kinds of brain activity in speakers of different languages. The application of psycholinguistic methods to typological research question is also a promising line of research.

10. Major research sites Despite its aim to investigate the world-wide linguistic diversity, typology is mainly practiced in Western Europe, the US, Russia and Australia and New Zealand and its most important publications are now written in a single language, English. Major centers of typological research in Northern Europe are Aarhus, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Moscow, Stockholm, St. Petersburg and Uppsala.

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11. Most important perodical publications The most important journal dedicated to linguistics is Linguistic Typology (1997-). Others are STUF - Language Typology and Universals (1948-) and Linguistic Discovery (2002-). Many prestigious linguistic journals, such as Language (1925-), (1965-), Linguistics (1963-), (1977-), publish many contributions to typology. Baltic Linguistics (2010-) is a Baltic journal with a primarily typological perspective.

12. Recommended literature Bybee, J. 1985. Morphology: The study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Corbett, G. G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, W. 2003 (2 ed.). Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Vos, C. & R. Pfau, 2015. Sign language typology: the contribution of rural sign languages. Annual Review of Linguistics 1(1), 265-288. Dahl, Ö. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Georgakopoulos T & S. Polis. 2018. The semantic map model: State of the art and future avenues for linguistic research. Language and Linguistics Compass 12(2), e12270. Haspelmath, M., E. König, W. Oesterreicher, and W. Raible, eds. 2001. Language Typology and Language Universals. 2 volumes. Berlin: de Gruyter Kortmann, B., ed. 2004. Dialectology Meets Typology: Dialect grammar from a cross- linguistic perspective. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. Moravcsik, E. A. 2013. Introducing Language Typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shopen, T. (ed.) 2007. Language typology and syntactic description. Volumes I-III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Song, J. J. (ed.). 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stassen, Leon. 2009. Predicative Possession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stolz, T., Stroh, C. and A. Urdze. 2006. On Comitatives and Related Categories: A typological study with special focus on the languages of Europe. Berlin: de Gruyter. Trudgill, P. 2011. Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Important internet resources http://wals.info: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://glottolog.org/: Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian. 2020.Glottolog 4.2.1. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3754591 https://langsci-press.org/catalog/series/sidl Studies in Diversity Linguistics, Language Science Press. http://www.autotyp.uzh.ch/ Autotyp http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/ Moseley, Christopher (ed.). 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing. https://clics.clld.org/ Database of Cross-linguistic colexifications Rzymski, Christoph and Tresoldi, Tiago et al. 2019. The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross- linguistic polysemies. https://phoible.org/ Moran, Steven & McCloy, Daniel (eds.) 2019. PHOIBLE 2.0. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/: The Konstanz Universals Archive, ed. by Frans Plank and collaborators.

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