Linguistic Typology

Editor-in-Chief: Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
Founded by: Frans Plank

Language: English

First published: January 1, 1997

Publication Frequency: 3 issues per year

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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. Divers e 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)
Dediu, Dan, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria and Sinnemäki, Kaius. 2025. Replication, robustness and the angst of false positives: a timely target article and its multifaceted comments. Linguistic Typology 29(3). 459-462.
Special issues (If you have an idea for a Special Issue, contact the Editor)
Moran, Steven, Shelece Easterday and Eitan Grossman Special Issue on Phonological Typology. Linguistic Typology 27(2).
Debates (contact the Editor)
Language profiles, family portraits and areal surveys
Epps, Patience. 2008. Hup’s typological treasures: Description and explanation in the study of an Amazonian language. Linguistic Typology 12(2). 169–193.
Review articles (reviewing two or more books, or a whole subject area)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2018. The last word on polysynthesis: A review article. Linguistic Typology 22(2). 307-326.
Book reviews (all book reviews are commissioned by Review Editors)
Wier, Thomas R. 2024. Review of: Polinsky, Maria (ed.). 2021. Oxford handbook of the languages of the Caucasus. Linguistic Typology 28(3). 567-579.
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.
Contact the Editor if you have an idea that is not represented here
Joo, Ian and Hsu, Yu-Yin. 2025. Phonotacticon: a cross-linguistic phonotactic database. Linguistic Typology 29(2). 405-431.

Your Benefits

broad focus on the study of language typology and cross-linguistic variation
timely publication of high-quality peer-reviewed articles

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

July 9, 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.
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Grammar highlights 2020

August 10, 2021

Tatiana Nikitina

Article number: 000010151520212084

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Open Access
Typology re-done: Greenberg Nos. 37, 45, 34

November 12, 2025

Frans Plank

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This is a response to an article recently published in Linguistic Typology , ‘Gender, number and person: A three-way interaction’ (2024 Vol. 28(3). 537–565). Its purpose is to correct serious misrepresentations in that paper of the research record on the interaction between the inflectional categories of gender, number, and person, and to suggest how to engage more responsibly with Greenbergian universals to take typology forward.
Open Access
Number in the world’s languages. A comparative handbook

August 8, 2025

Jessica K. Ivani

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Open Access
Iconic features in nominal reduplication

November 17, 2025

Camil Staps

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Reduplicative morphology is intuitively well-suited for iconic meanings like plurality, but often also expresses seemingly counter-iconic meanings like diminution. At present, there is no satisfactory explanation of this apparent contradiction: under the recently popular view that both plurality and diminution make meaning more complex and are iconic because reduplicative forms are complex as well, reduplication is no different from other affixal strategies – an undesirable conclusion for various reasons. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it provides a set of atomic semantic features for the semantic field covered by nominal reduplication, thus identifying the core semantic notions involved cross-linguistically. Second, it proposes various precise iconicities that link specific formal characteristics of reduplicative patterns to these features. These iconicities lead to predictions concerning preferences of semantic features for certain formal types (full, partial, or echo reduplication), which are tested against 134 reduplicative patterns from 118 languages. Confirmed iconicities are Distortion , linking echo reduplication to a meaning of similarity (‘something like X’), and Completeness , linking full reduplication to universal quantification. Effects are weaker for partial reduplication; iconicities linking this type to e.g. diminutive function will have to be tested on a larger data set.
Open Access
A typology of positional differential argument marking

August 25, 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

August 15, 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.

Journal Impact Factor	1.6	2024, Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2025)
5-year Journal Impact Factor	2	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)
European Reference Index for the Humanities	0

Linguistic Typology

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