Volume 11, Issue 1

After ten years of regular journal fare, this issue of LT is special. To commemorate the journal's decennial, it collects the responses to an invitation (or, in some cases, request) from LT 's Editorial Board to reflect on where typology stands and where it is, or ought to be, going. These were the questions we asked two dozen or so prospective reflectors – ALT members all, and connected with LT in one way or another, but sampled for expected diversity rather than unity in how they would be answering our questions (and free rein was given anyhow as regards style): Has headway been made in linguistic typology or have we been going round in circles? What has most memorably been found out in typology, and what is there yet to discover (the lexicon, semantics, phonology, …)? What state is typology in now, intellectually and academically, and where will it go in future? What indeed is typology and what is not? What is, or ought to be, special about the aims, methods, and results of typology, in relation to other types of linguistic pursuits – such as: grammar and dictionary writing; field linguistics; historical linguistics, deep and shallow time; sociolinguistics; psycho- and neurolinguistics; language acquisition/learning and teaching; computational linguistics; well, “theoretical” linguistics; … ? How does, or should, typology interact with the world at large, inhabited among others by cognitive/social/physical/evolutionary anthropologists, population scientists, archaeologists, cognitive neuroscientists, statisticians, language learners, school children, the reading and/or viewing public? How well is LT serving the field as a forum? Is LT 's remit well- or ill-defined, cogent or futile? Is LT a faithful or distorting mirror of scholarly goings-on in typology? Does LT breed complacency and stagnation or provoke thought and stir into action? Published in LT , does work have the resonance it ought to be getting?

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.

There is no doubt that LT is an excellent journal. Typology is the main interest of many linguists. The need for a specialized international journal was certainly felt ten years ago, and LT has worthily responded to that need. It has attracted many scholars of various countries, published many good articles, and tackled a number of questions, all of them interesting.

1. Introduction The study of language typology has often been viewed as a rather special endeavor with few if any similarities to other pursuits within linguistics and outside it. Here are three such oppositions. a. Language-typological generalizations are different from single-language rules. b. Language-typological generalizations are different from theoretical claims. c. Language-typological generalizations are different from explanatory principles: they describe but do not explain.

1. Finishing unfinished business 1.1. The first true linguistic typologist – recognisable as a predecessor by the likes of ourselves, now publishing in journals like Linguistic Typology – was Giovanni Domenico Campanella (1568–1639). A Dominican friar from Calabria (Fra Tommaso by monastic name) who was to rise to lasting fame as a utopian social thinker with his La città del sole , Campanella was a philosopher in the wide and colourful Renaissance sense. As was the standard repertoire, his Philosophia realis (1623) covered Physiologia, Ethica, Politica , and Oeconomica , and his Philosophia rationalis (1638) continued with Dialectica, Grammatica, Rhetorica, Poetica , and Historiographia ; but, with labour not yet divided between scholar and wizard, Campanella also distinguished himself as a seeker of arcaner truths.

If you ask a typologist what linguistic typology is about, the majority's answer will essentially be that it is all about linguistic diversity, about the values various features have in the languages of the world. If you press further, many would specify that typology is about what is typical of human language and what is not. In fact, the latter seems to be a natural extension of the former.

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.

Let me say right away that I do not consider (“formal”) linguistic theory and linguistic typology as two separate approaches. The in-depth, abstract analysis of a certain phenomenon (say, how a restrictive relative clause is built) and the study of what variation there is concerning that phenomenon (how many ways of forming restrictive relative clauses are found across languages) are two sides of the same inquiry.

1. Recurrent sound patterns A point of consensus in phonology is that numerous sound patterns recur in the world's languages. Recurrent sound patterns are those which recur with greater than chance frequency, and include patterns of contrast, patterns of distribution, and patterns of alternation. Recurrent sound patterns are found in synchronic and diachronic systems, and include the most common segmental and suprasegmental contrasts; the most common types of assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, lenition, fortition; and recurrent phonotactics (Blevins 2004).

Typology in its modern form is connected with the search for universals. This works to the advantage of certain types of questions, those which allow a more or less coherent answer for any language. Phonology, syntax, and semantics are usually the starting point, and such topics as phonological inventories, word order, and the range of expressible semantic distinctions constitute the bulk of research. These also form the core questions of general linguistics, so this research emphasis is only to be expected. Conversely, one area that receives relatively little attention from typologists is morphology. This too is hardly surprising: of all the aspects of language, morphology is the most language-specific and hence least generalizable. Indeed, even the very presence of a meaningful morphological component is language-specific.

1. Introduction Structural categories of grammar (such as clitic, affix, compound, adjective, pronoun, dative, subject, passive, diphthong, coronal) have to be posited by linguists and by children during acquisition. This would be easier if they simply had to choose from a list of pre-established categories. However, existing proposals for what such a list might be are still heavily based on the Latin and English grammatical tradition. Thus, descriptive linguists still have no choice but to adopt the Boasian approach of positing special language-particular categories for each language. Theorists often resist it, but the crosslinguistic evidence is not converging on a smallish set of possibly innate categories. On the contrary, almost every newly described language presents us with some “crazy” new category that hardly fits existing taxonomies. Although there is thus no good evidence for pre-established categories, linguists still often engage in category-assignment controversies such as “Is the Tagalog ang -phrase a subject or a topic?”, “Is German er a pronoun or a determiner?”, “Are Mandarin Chinese property words adjectives or verbs?”, or “Is the Romanian definite article a clitic or a suffix?”

1. An important trend in linguistic typology The first paper in the first issue of this journal (Kirby 1997) took on the question of the Keenan-Comrie accessibility hierarchy for relativization (Keenan & Comrie 1977). In a tightly argued presentation, Kirby showed that the effects of the hierarchy fall out from “competition” between two types of complexity. One is the structural complexity of the relative clause, which is calculated in part by counting the number of nodes dominating the trace or pronoun within the NP dominating the relative clause (see Hawkins 1994). The other is morphological complexity, which is calculated in part on the basis of the number of morphemes that need to be processed.

1. Introduction Although the term “lexical typology” is often used as if it were self-explanatory there is not much consensus on what exactly it can refer to, apart from the evident fact that it involves crosslinguistic research on the lexicon. Many linguists will probably agree with Lehrer's (1992: 249) widely quoted definition that lexical typology is concerned with the “characteristic ways in which language […] packages semantic material into words” (cf. the overviews in Koch 2001 and Brown 2001). This would make lexical typology a sub-branch of semantic typology concerned with the lexicon, where semantic typology, in the definition of Evans (forthcoming), is “the systematic cross-linguistic study of how languages express meaning by way of signs”. Other definitions of lexical typology, clinging to the apparently safer interface with grammar, focus on “typologically relevant features in the grammatical structure of the lexicon” (Lehmann 1990: 163) or on typologically relevant vs. language-specific patterns of the lexicon-grammar interaction (Behrens & Sasse 1997).

1. Introduction China possesses rich linguistic resources which remain relatively untapped: the ten main Sinitic languages or dialect groups account for roughly 93% of the population (Mandarin, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Hui, Wu, Min, Kejia, Yue, and Pinghua); the remaining 7% comprise the many different “minority” languages in long term contact with Sinitic such as Tibeto-Burman, Mongolian, Hmong, and Tai. In an almost unprecedented state of affairs, written records for Chinese extend without a break 3,000 years into the past, furnishing a rich documentation for any kind of historical study.

1. Introduction Frans Plank, the Editor-in-chief of Linguistic Typology (LT) , posed the following questions to the Editorial Board (e-mail, August 14, 2006): LT has now been in circulation for a decade. Time to ask several questions: Has headway been made in Linguistic Typology – the journal and, even more importantly, the eponymous field? Or have we been going round in circles? What has most memorably been found out in typology, and what is there yet to discover (the lexicon, phonology, …)? What state is typology in now, intellectually and academically, and where will it go in the future? What indeed is typology and what is not? What is, or ought to be, special about the aims, methods, and results of typology, in relation to other types of linguistic pursuits? Such as: grammar and dictionary writing; field linguistics; historical linguistics, deep and shallow time; sociolinguistics; psycholinguistics; language acquisition/learning and teaching; computational linguistics; well, “theoretical” linguistics; …

The field of linguistic typology, a centuries-old enterprise, is showing extraordinary new vitality and growth. While it fell somewhat to the wayside during the early generative period, linguists of all persuasions now acknowledge the importance of the study of all aspects of comparative grammar: phonetics, phonology,morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse. The significance of typology to both synchronic and diachronic linguistics is also widely recognized. Crosslinguistic work figures centrally in formal, functional, and cognitive approaches to linguistic theory, as well as in descriptive and historical research. The quest for linguistic universals and the documentation of linguistic diversity, once thought to be logically independent (if indeed not contradictory) concerns, are typically integrated in current research. The dramatic rebirth and increase of interest in linguistic diversity is in part fueled by the commitment of linguists and others in the scholarly community to the documentation and preservation of endangered languages. The interdisciplinary and increasingly joint efforts between geneticists, linguists, archeologists etc. in tracing the exodus of the human population from Africa and into other parts of the world relies heavily on the expertise of specialists of languages from all parts of the world.

Typology has the hallmarks of a mature discipline: a society, conferences, journals, books, textbooks, classic works, a founding father, and people who are called and call themselves typologists. A typologist probably teaches a course with a title like “Typology and Universals” which includes readings by Greenberg, Dixon, and Dryer, often a textbook such as Whaley (1997), Comrie (1989), Song (2001), and/or Croft (2003), and some grammar-reading assignments. With regard to research, the typologist reads grammars, does at least some crosslinguistic research, has probably done some fieldwork and description, and usually does not identify with or claim allegiance to any particular named theoretical framework. Despite these conspicuous identifying marks, I submit that the position of typologists on this should be that there is no such subfield of linguistics as the usual referent of “typology”.

1. Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g., a language with a gender distinction exclusively in the 1st person singular.

This article addresses the issue of the different status that typology has in American linguistics as opposed to European linguistics. The historical roots of the difference lie in both structural and generative linguistics, in the contrasts between post-Bloomfieldian structuralism in the US vs. Praguean structuralism in Europe, and in the extent of the influence of generative grammar on the two continents.

A significant part of the debate over the practice of “good” linguistic typology is concerned with the issue of methodology that can produce generalizations at a satisfactory depth based on a satisfactory sample size. As the articles in this collection themselves attest, there is no single goal for typology: the inventory of possible human language structures, variation within a phenomenon, the diffusion of particular phenomena, areal patterns, as well as the stability of linguistic phenomena over time are just a sampling of the concerns which typologists have had. Even given such diverse goals – where methodological differences might be take for granted as necessary – the debate over typological methodology persists.

As is well known, phonological typology was a central concern to many structuralists (Trubetzkoy 1939, Jakobson 1968, Hockett 1955) and also figured centrally in many treatments of typology in general, e.g., Greenberg (1957, 1978). On the other hand, there has been a tendency for subsequent discussions and textbooks on linguistic typology to underrepresent and even ignore phonology, e.g., Whaley (1997). This is unfortunate not only because phonological typology is of importance in itself, but also because the approach of phonologists to typology might serve as a model for others to emulate. The main points I would like to make in this brief note are the following: (i) Phonological typology involves the comparative study of linguistic systems – i.e., paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties of inputs, outputs, and their relations. While phonological typology and phonetic typology are sometimes not distinguished, a surface inventory is not a system in the sense intended here. (ii) There is no clear division between phonological typology and phonological theory. Given their shared concern with the nature of phonological systems, one can't do insightful typology without addressing the same analytical issues that confront phonological theory. Throughout the history of phonology, the two have been inseparable both in principle and in practice.

1. Introduction The goal of this article is twofold: to present a brief overview of differences and similarities between formal grammars (regardless of particular mode of implementation) and typology, and to outline the common challenge faced by both. To anticipate our conclusion, typological approaches to language and theory construction have much to offer each other, but need to engage in a real dialogue, rather than merely talk about the need for such a dialogue. Otherwise both orientations run the risk of becoming (increasingly) irrelevant.

In these remarks on the relationship between typology and theoretical (morpho) syntax, we touch briefly on three issues: what is their relationship in practice now, what relationship should one in principle expect given the founding goals of each enterprise, and what kind of research could help connect the two fields in a more productive way in the future.

Typology has a low profile in much of American linguistics, especially outside of phonology (Nichols 2007, Hyman 2007, Van Valin 2007). Yet, as I will suggest, the study of the results and methods of modern typology has important lessons for us as the field of linguistics undergoes a paradigm shift. Typologists study a wide range of language types, but I will show that even when one does theoretical work on a single, well-studied standardized national language like English, one can (and should) benefit from an awareness of typological findings.