Typology and linguistic theory in the past decade: A personal view
-
William Croft
Abstract
1997 was a good year for typology. It marked the inauguration of Linguistic Typology, the occasion of this decennial retrospective. 1997 also witnessed the publication of the first volume of the EUROTYP series by Mouton de Gruyter (Siewierska (ed.) 1997). These volumes represent the culmination of the European Typology Project, which in addition to producing the research contained in the EUROTYP volumes, brought European typologists together on a regular basis, and created the sense of community that, among other things, led to the establishment of the Association for Linguistic Typology. 1997 also witnessed the publication of the first two volumes of the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory monograph series. Haspelmath's Indefinite Pronouns (Haspelmath 1997), the first volume, represents one of the best classical typological studies and brought wider attention to the semantic map model, of which more below. Stassen's Intransitive Predication (Stassen 1997) is awesome in scope and accomplishment, representing the largest crosslinguistic survey outside of phonology and word order up to that time, and providing many profound insights into the syntax and semantics of predication. Finally, 1997 witnessed the founding of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with a Department of Linguistics directed by Bernard Comrie and devoted to typological research, language documentation, and related activities. This institute has provided resources and a focus for important new research in typology, such as The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. (eds.) 2005), as well as a new locus for bringing together typologists, field linguists, and native speaker consultants.
© 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
