[Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

[Randy J. LaPolla]

Hi again, everyone,
I just wanted to follow up on my last post about language description and mention something in relation to Larry’s support for including phonetics/phonology: 

Those who do language description have to deal with it all, and to do a good job, one does not just have a chapter on phonology and then other chapters on morphosyntax without talking about the relations between the two. Unfortunately the Bloomfield-Chomsky Structuralists did separate these things (even ignoring meaning in describing structure at one or more points), but if one looks at Firth, Halliday, and the London School generally, one can see one way that not only are prosody and other aspects of the phonology analysed as part of the utterance, the context of situation and the context of culture (following Malinowski) are also inseparable parts of the analysis. Particularly now that information structure has become such an important part of describing a language, and in many languages information structure is marked as particular combinations of intonation and grammatical constructions  (also something that Halliday, influenced by the Prague School, worked on in the 1960’s), and the typology of these combinations is quite a relevant area of study, we cannot separate out the phonology.

And to clarify my earlier point, what I meant was that we often find new types, and so thereby expand the typology, or possibly rework it altogether, and this can be done in describing a single language, and showing how what you are describing differs from what has been found before. That is, you contextualise your findings. Certainly makes the description more interesting if one does that.

Randy
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Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （羅仁地）
Professor of Linguistics and Chinese, School of Humanities 
Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive | Singapore 637332
http://randylapolla.net/
Most recent book:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324



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