Summary: Typological studies based on original texts

Tue Jul 11 15:20:35 UTC 2006

A further comment is inserted in your letter, in CAPITALS
prof.Paolo Ramat
Università di Pavia
Dipartimento di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata
tel. ##39 0382 984 484
fax ##39 0382 984 487

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bernhard Waelchli 
  To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG 
  Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 3:18 PM
  Subject: Summary: Typological studies based on original texts

  Dear colleagues

  Sorry for mistakenly having sent to all my answer to Martin in the local vernacular. Please, throw it away! Here is, however, a list of references as a result of a query I posted some weeks ago about typological studies based on original texts. 

  I have received answers by Peter Austin, Balthasar Bickel, Greville Corbett, Matthew Dryer, Nick Evans, Martin Haspelmath, Kees Hengefeld, Paul Hopper, Pieter Muysken, Michael Noonan, Paolo Ramat, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Stephen Matthews, and Wolfgang Schulze, and I am happy that what started as a simple information question also resulted in some more general discussion. 

  Some of you argued that I should include a broader range of studies than what I asked for (lower number of languages, other kinds of studies). Since I find all the studies that have been pointed out to me highly relevant and useful, I simply included everything I got (as far as I could identify the references) and added some more. I certainly missed a lot and am still grateful for additional references.

  I am especially grateful to Paolo Ramat for having pointed out the relevance of parallel texts and questionnaires as other additional sources expanding the typologist's toolkit beyond reference grammars. In addition, psycholinguistic approaches have to be mentioned, using non-verbal stimuli for data collection, including the well-known Pear stories and Frog stories. In my view these are all instances of a single hyper-approach to data collection in typology, which I call "descriptive typology", viz. all typological data collection processes based on primary sources rather than descriptions and on exemplars rather than abstractions.

  IT HAS TO BE REMEMBERED THAT  PEAR STORIES, FROG STORIES AS WELL AS THE ORAL NARRATION OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN UNWILLING LEADING A WORKERS' STRIKE WITH A RED FLAG ('MODERN TIMES') HAVE BEEN USED IN REGISTERING SECOND LANGUAGE SPONTANEOUS ACQUISITION AND THE THEREBY USED STRATEGIES BY IMMIGRANTS: SEE E.G. 'VERSO L'ITALIANO' ED. BY ANNA GIACALONE RAMAT, CAROCCI , ROMA 2003.  

  THIS IS ANOTHER KIND OF PARALLEL TEXTS: HOW TO SOLVE THE SAME  NARRATIVE (I.E. SEMANTIC) PROBLEMS STARTING FROM LANGUAGES ENDOWED WITH DIFFERENT STRATEGIES.

  Because the list of references got quite long, here is what corresponds most prototypically to the original query:
  - John Myhill's (1992) typological discourse analysis (including all the previous work mentioned there, especially by Talmy Givón) (thanks to Stephen Matthews and Kees Hengefeld for having pointed out this to me.)
  - Matthew Dryer's about 1,000 datapoints based on texts in WALS (in a total of more than 20,000 data points: it is really amazing, Matthew, how you manage to do this!),
  - Michael Noonan's (2003) unpublished work about referential density (including much own fieldwork) [see also Bickel's 2003 study on referential density, Balthasar is still working on it with a larger sample of languages.]
  - Tom Güldemann's (2001) unpublished study.

  The references that follow are in no way exhaustive for exemplar-based typological approaches. The list is strongly biased toward what has been pointed out to me and toward what I have added to the list. Please, tell me if you have some more. The list is certainly highly deficient, especially in the domains of phonology and phonetics. Maybe it is nevertheless of some use. 

  Kind regards
  Bernhard Wälchli

  LIST OF REFERENCES

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  Bickel, Balthasar. (2003). Referential density in discourse and syntactic typology. Language 79: 708-36.
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