Linguistic Typology

Editor-in-Chief: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
Begründet von: Frans Plank

Sprache: Englisch

Erstveröffentlichung: 1. Januar 1997

Erscheinungsweise: 3 Hefte pro Jahr

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Open Access from 2024

Starting with Volume 27 (2024), Linguistic Typology is transformed into a Diamond Open Access journal thanks to our subscribers participating in the Subscribe to Open (S2O) project. All current content will be published under a Creative Commons License (CC-BY 4.0) at no cost to authors and will be freely available to readers.

All authors retain copyright, unless – due to their local circumstances – their work is not copyrighted.

Objective

Linguistic Typology provides a forum for all work of relevance to the study of language typology and cross-linguistic variation. It welcomes work taking a typological perspective on all domains of the structure of spoken and signed languages, including historical change, language processing, and sociolinguistics. Diverse descriptive and theoretical frameworks are welcomed so long as they have a clear bearing on the study of cross-linguistic variation. We welcome cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of linguistic diversity, as well as work dealing with just one or a few languages, as long as it is typologically informed and typologically and theoretically relevant, and contains new empirical evidence.

Linguistic Typology is published by De Gruyter Mouton for the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT). For membership and subscription details, contact the Secretary: Dmitry Idiatov

Article formats

• Research articles
• Target articles with peer commentary (If you have an idea for one, contact the Editor)
• Special issues (If you have an idea for a Special Issue, contact the Editor)
• Debates (contact the Editor)
• Language profiles, family portraits and areal surveys
• Review articles (reviewing two or more books, or a whole subject area)
• Book reviews (all book reviews are commissioned by Review Editors)
• Methodological contributions (e.g., reports on and reviews of toolkits, databases, software, collection of texts and corpora, archival collections resulting from fieldwork etc.) These should include a discussion of how/why the material is of typological relevance.
• Squibs (very short and often humorous pieces on a very specific topic intended to encourage debate)
• Contact the Editor if you have an idea that is not represented here

Ihre Vorteile

broad focus on the study of language typology and cross-linguistic variation
timely publication of high-quality peer-reviewed articles
freely available Editor’s choice articles

Geschichte

Linguistic Typology has been published by Mouton de Gruyter / De Gruyter Mouton for the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) since 1997. Frans Plank (Konstanz / Oxford) was the Founding Editor of the journal, and, with volume 22, Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm took over in 2018.

Other publications in the field

Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]
Linguistics
Linguistics Vanguard
Mouton Handbooks of Indo-European Typology [MHIET]
STUF – Language Typology and Universals

Open Access
A typology of positional differential argument marking

25. August 2025

Ilja A. Seržant, Sergey Say, Andreas Hölzl, Aigul Zakirova, Xinyi Gao, Andreas Pregla

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In this paper, we introduce the notion of positional differential argument marking, a pattern in which the use of argument-coding devices, such as flags or indexes, is contingent upon the linear position of arguments in the clause. Compared to factors such as animacy and referentiality, the impact of word order on differential argument marking is understudied. In order to fill this gap, we compiled and annotated a dataset of 93 PDAM patterns, identified in a genealogically and areally diverse convenience sample of 70 languages. Most patterns involve a competition between a default, or zero, form and a non-zero form, but word order was found to affect argument indexing and argument flagging in a non-identical way. Non-zero indexing is more likely in the case of preverbal arguments. Non-zero flagging is favored in verb-edge orders and also when the argument is used in a non-default position. We hypothesize that this distinction reflects avoiding higher costs in processing referents in the discourse in the case of indexing, but more efficient comprehension of the clause in the case of flagging.
Open Access
The evolution of gender and number agreement in the noun phrase

15. August 2025

Olena Shcherbakova, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Francesca Di Garbo

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We test the dependency relations between gender and number posited by Greenberg’s Universal 36 by focusing on patterns of gender and number agreement in the noun phrase from an evolutionary perspective. To do so, we use data from Grambank, the largest existing database of morphosyntactic structures in the world’s languages. Based on data from 1,608 languages worldwide, we use a Reverse Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to investigate the order of emergence of gender and number marking on adjectives, demonstratives and (for a smaller dataset) articles. Globally, our findings support Greenberg’s idea that gender marking hinges on number marking. In addition, they show that both adjectives and demonstratives play a special role in the development of noun-phrase internal agreement, in that under different evolutionary scenarios the occurrence of gender and number agreement on adjectives or demonstratives may favor the spreading of agreement to other target types. We compare these results with family-specific patterns of language change and further discuss their relevance to the general understanding of nominal morphosyntax.
Open Access
Number in the world’s languages. A comparative handbook

8. August 2025

Jessica K. Ivani

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Open Access
Replication, robustness and the angst of false positives: a timely target article and its multifaceted comments

30. Juli 2025

Dan Dediu, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Kaius Sinnemäki

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Open Access
Weak theories and robustness: Commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

30. Juli 2025

Adam J. R. Tallman

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Open Access
The value of replication: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

30. Juli 2025

Matthew S. Dryer

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Open Access
An experimentalist’s perspective on replicability in typology: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

30. Juli 2025

Kenny Smith

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Open Access
Commentary: Replication, robustness or methodological competition?

30. Juli 2025

Harald Hammarström

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Open Access
Authors’ response to “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology”

28. Juli 2025

Laura Becker, Matías Guzmán Naranjo

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Open Access
Different models, different assumptions, different findings: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

28. Juli 2025

Olena Shcherbakova, Volker Gast, Simon J. Greenhill, Damián Blasi, Russell D. Gray, Hedvig Skirgård

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Open Access
Sampling matters: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

25. Juli 2025

Matti Miestamo, Kaius Sinnemäki

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Open Access
What is ‘advanced statistical modelling’?: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

25. Juli 2025

Christophe Coupé

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Open Access
Good enough for Galton, and much more: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

25. Juli 2025

Chundra A. Cathcart

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Open Access
Embracing uncertainty, and the multifaceted soul of linguistic typology: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

25. Juli 2025

Francesca Di Garbo

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Open Access
Grammar Highlights 2024

25. Juli 2025

Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada

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Open Access
Open research requires open mindedness: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

24. Juli 2025

Lauren Gawne, Helene N. Andreassen, Lindsay Ferrara, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker

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Open Access
Geospatial effects on phonological complexity in the world’s languages

18. Juli 2025

Frederik Hartmann, Johanna Nichols

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Linguistic complexity has generally been seen as influenced by ecological, demographic, and sociolinguistic factors and has been approached by seeking correlations of increased complexity along one linguistic dimension with one or another extralinguistic factor. Here we use a multidimensional definition of phonological complexity and analyze its global patterning quantitatively across predefined continents or sets of continents. We use linear and nonlinear regression models to estimate the gradient of geographical distributions of various complexity measures. We found significantly lower phonological complexity levels in South America and Australasia, suggesting isolation by distance (from centers of demographic and economic influence in the Old World). An unexpected finding is that our models show a broad transitional zone between the different levels of complexity in Africa and Europe. This Euro-African Transition Zone (ETZ) has its core between the Equator and the African coastline of the Mediterranean Sea. It has not been regarded as a language area before and is not a convergence area, but it has a robust geospatial complexity profile and we propose it as an area. We also find reasons to regard phonological complexity as a coherent property in itself, with its several dimensions behaving as a whole, and not as adaptive but as geospatially patterned. This paper is an exercise in using synchronic analysis of geolinguistic patterns of complexity to draw inferences about long-term change and evolutionary trends in language. On a higher level, the paper employs methods of geospatial analysis novel to this particular problem with the goal of raising new questions and laying groundwork for wider research into the distribution of linguistic complexity.
Open Access
Replicability all the way up: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo

17. Juli 2025

Caterina Mauri, Andrea Sansò

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Open Access
Direct speech, silent pauses, speech verbs, and basic word order: a comparative corpus study of 12 languages

9. Juli 2025

Jocelyn Aznar, Frank Seifart

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This study investigates cross-linguistically the position of speech verbs and the occurrence of silent pauses relative to direct speech reports in narrative oral texts. We hypothesize that the position of speech verbs depends on the basic word order of verbs and their complements (VO vs. OV), and that the occurrence of speech verbs and pauses exhibit complementarity based on their shared function of marking the onset or end of reported speech. We use language documentation corpora from an areally balanced sample of 12 languages. We show that in most VO languages speech verbs exclusively precede speech reports, while in OV languages they may precede or follow them, or intervene, as middle verbs. Speakers of VO languages very often pause after speech reports, i.e. the position where there is no speech verb, while speakers of OV languages often pause before the speech report, and almost never between a speech report and a following ending verb. We conclude that basic word order substantially influences how speech reports are construed and prosodically phrased, in addition to asymmetries resulting from constraints on sequential ordering that are specific to complex units in general and to reported speech in particular.
Open Access
Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology

25. Februar 2025

Laura Becker, Matías Guzmán Naranjo

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Replication and replicability are fundamental tools to ensure that research results can be verified by an independent third party, reproducing the original study and ideally finding similar results. Yet, replication has not played a very important role in language typology so far, with most of the discussion around replication concerned with different types of language samples and sampling methods. This study addresses the issue of replication in typology in a different way. We use the original datasets of four previous typological studies (Berg 2020; Dryer 2018; Seržant 2021; Shcherbakova et al. 2023) to show how statistical modeling can be used to test methodological robustness in typology. We do so employing advanced statistical bias controls, namely phylogenetic regression for genetic effects and a Gaussian Process for contact effects. While we could replicate some of the original results, parts of our findings differed from the original ones, revealing important methodological insights. Our comparisons show that more advanced statistical techniques that can model the phylogenetic and contact relations between languages pick up more complex patterns in the data than traditional sampling methods, and they capture more of the real relations between languages and their effects on linguistic structure.
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Grammar highlights 2020

10. August 2021

Tatiana Nikitina

Artikelnummer: 000010151520212084

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Journal Impact Factor	1.6	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	2.0	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
Journal Citation Indicator	1.26	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
CiteScore	3.7	2024, Scopus (Elsevier B.V., 2025)
SCImago Journal Rank	0.854	2024, SJR (Scimago Lab, 2025; Data Source: Scopus)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	2.198	2024, CWTS Journal Indicators (CWTS B.V., 2025; Data Source: Scopus)

Linguistic Typology

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