What or where can we do better? Some personal reflections on (the tenth anniversary of) Linguistic Typology
-
Jae Jung Song
Abstract
1. Preamble
On a personal level, the appearance in 1997 of Linguistic Typology (or LT henceforth), as the official journal of the Association for Linguistic Typology (or ALT henceforth), could not have been more timely. I thought that it augured well for the book that I had just started to write (i.e., Song 2001).When I completed my PhD (in linguistic typology) in the early 1990s, a well-known linguist (whose name I am not at liberty to reveal) confided to me that all that needed to be discovered in linguistic typology had been discovered, and that not many would hang around to do (any more) linguistic typology. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I had for some time harboured the uneasy feeling that perhaps I might have committed myself to something that would soon go out of fashion, if not existence – which is understandable given the unidentified linguist's reputation and my status as a fresh PhD graduate. However, the establishment in 1994 of the ALT, together with the advent of LT, gave me all the encouragement that I needed to proceed with the writing of the book. As a matter of fact, if the quality and the quantity of the articles published in LT over the years are anything to go by (not to mention major publications such as The World Atlas of Language Structures (or WALS), the EUROTYP series, Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook, and the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology), the linguist who expressed his pessimism about the future of linguistic typology couldn't have got it more wrong.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- What or where can we do better? Some personal reflections on (the tenth anniversary of) Linguistic Typology
- Wider and deeper
- What is universal about typology?
- Extent and limits of linguistic diversity as the remit of typology – but through constraints on what is diversity limited?
- Representative sampling and typological explanation: A phenomenological lament
- Typology and linguistic theory in the past decade: A personal view
- A note on linguistic theory and typology
- The importance of typology in explaining recurrent sound patterns
- Linguistic typology: Morphology
- Pre-established categories don't exist: Consequences for language description and typology
- Linguistic typology requires crosslinguistic formal categories
- Typological approaches to lexical semantics
- Chinese linguistics and typology: The state of the art
- Interfaces between linguistic typology and child language research
- Typology in American linguistics: An appraisal of the field
- What, if anything, is typology?
- Typology in the 21st century: Major current developments
- Some thoughts on the reason for the lesser status of typology in the USA as opposed to Europe
- Methodology and the empirical base of typology
- Where's phonology in typology?
- Linguistic typology and theory construction: Common challenges ahead
- On the relationship of typology to theoretical syntax
- A few lessons from typology
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- What or where can we do better? Some personal reflections on (the tenth anniversary of) Linguistic Typology
- Wider and deeper
- What is universal about typology?
- Extent and limits of linguistic diversity as the remit of typology – but through constraints on what is diversity limited?
- Representative sampling and typological explanation: A phenomenological lament
- Typology and linguistic theory in the past decade: A personal view
- A note on linguistic theory and typology
- The importance of typology in explaining recurrent sound patterns
- Linguistic typology: Morphology
- Pre-established categories don't exist: Consequences for language description and typology
- Linguistic typology requires crosslinguistic formal categories
- Typological approaches to lexical semantics
- Chinese linguistics and typology: The state of the art
- Interfaces between linguistic typology and child language research
- Typology in American linguistics: An appraisal of the field
- What, if anything, is typology?
- Typology in the 21st century: Major current developments
- Some thoughts on the reason for the lesser status of typology in the USA as opposed to Europe
- Methodology and the empirical base of typology
- Where's phonology in typology?
- Linguistic typology and theory construction: Common challenges ahead
- On the relationship of typology to theoretical syntax
- A few lessons from typology
