Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages.[1] Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies.[2]
Linguistic typology is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on the grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence.[3] The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families, emphasizing the importance of lesser-known languages in gaining insight into human language.[4]
Speculations of the existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school. At the time, Latin was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the Latin alphabet was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics was established in the Renaissance period. For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and the three ‘holy languages’, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Nicolas Beauzée's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish, Irish, Welsh, Basque, Quechua, and Chinese.[5]
The conquest and conversion of the world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work is accounted for in the ‘Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know’, 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás. Johann Christoph Adelung collected the first large language sample with the Lord's prayer in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817).[5]
More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include Franz Bopp's 'Conjugation System' (1816) and Wilhelm von Humboldt's ‘On the Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ (posthumous 1836). In 1818, August Wilhelm Schlegel made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea was later developed by others including August Schleicher, Heymann Steinthal, Franz Misteli, Franz Nicolaus Finck, and Max Müller.[3]
The word 'typology' was proposed by Georg von der Gabelentz in his Sprachwissenschaft (1891). Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project begins from the 1961 conference on language universals at Dobbs Ferry. Speakers included Roman Jakobson, Charles F. Hockett, and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology.[3] Winfred P. Lehmann introduced Greenbergian typological theory to Indo-European studies in the 1970s.[6]
During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International, which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue, as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the World Atlas of Language Structures, among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including Functional Discourse Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, and Systemic Functional Linguistics. During the early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of linguistic universals became questioned by linguists proposing evolutionary typology.[7]
Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world.[8] Major types of non-chance distribution include:
Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross-linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic is true).[9] An example of an implicational hierarchy is that dual pronouns are only found in languages with plural pronouns while singular pronouns (or unspecified in terms of number) are found in all languages. The implicational hierarchy is thus singular < plural < dual (etc.).
Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for the description and comparison of languages.
The main subfields of linguistic typology include the empirical fields of syntactic, phonological and lexical typology. Additionally, theoretical typology aims to explain the empirical findings, especially statistical tendencies or implicational hierarchies.
See main article: Word order. Syntactic typology studies a vast array of grammatical phenomena from the languages of the world. Two well-known issues include dominant order and left-right symmetry.
One set of types reflects the basic order of subject, verb, and direct object in sentences:
These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances.[10]
In the 1980s, linguists began to question the relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location.[11] Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German (German: Ich '''habe''' einen Fuchs im Wald '''gesehen''' - *"I have a fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch (Dutch; Flemish: Hans '''vermoedde''' dat Jan Marie '''zag leren zwemmen''' - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh (Welsh: '''Mae'''<nowiki>'</nowiki>r gwirio sillafu wedi'i '''gwblhau'''