Typology

[Bernhard Waelchli]

Since Yuri insists that there should be more answers to his everything 
else but trivial question, three remarks about what typology is not (as 
I see it):

Linguistic typology is no AOC (appellation d'origine contrôlée). It is 
not like Champagne, it is rather like Emmental cheese, everybody is 
allowed to produce it (provided that the market accepts it). An example 
for a discipline in linguistics that is a clearer label is Romance 
linguistics. You cannot work on Takelma and Burushaski exclusively and 
claim that you are doing Romance linguistics. There have been various 
attempts to make typology into a more strictly defined label, but none 
of them has been successful hitherto. This has both disadvantages and 
advantages. An advantage is more freedom of research than in other 
disciplines. Typologists are allowed to ask interesting questions about 
language whether or not these questions fit a certain established 
framework. Whoever put it there there is a good definition of typology 
on the ALT homepage: "the scientific study of typology, that is, of 
cross-linguistic diversity and the patterns underlying it" 
(http://www.linguistic-typology.org/). This leaves many things open and 
focuses on three central aspects: cross-linguistic, diversity, and 
underlying patterns.

Typology is not exactly the same thing as field linguistics, even though 
much of what Hyman (2001) says about fieldwork as a state of mind 
applies to typology as well (e.g., "going out into the unknown" [2001: 
29], "study whatever is out there" [2001: 30]). There is certainly a 
very tight symbiosis of field linguistics and typology and this for many 
very good reasons, but if the two were exactly the same thing there 
wouldn't be any need of a discipline typology or for an Association for 
Linguistic Typology.

Typology as a linguistic discipline is not the same thing as typology in 
the sense of a classification or taxonomy. Scientific disciplines are 
mass nouns; typology in the sense of classification is a count noun. It 
is true that many books and articles on typology propose a typology and 
many papers contain the prefab "Toward a typology of...", which seems to 
be an abbreviation for "Toward a typological [in the sense of the 
discipline] typology [in the sense of classification] of...". However, 
typological work does not necessarily always have the goal of 
establishing a new classification of languages into types.

Hyman, Larry M. (2001). Fieldwork as a state of mind. In Newman, Paul & 
Ratliff, Martha (eds.), /Linguistic Fieldwork/, 15-33. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Bernhard Wälchli


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