[Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

[David Gil]

What linguistics (or biology for that matter, or sociology, or whatever) 
*isn't* comparative?

I can understand why a university department, or a journal, might wish 
to focus on, say, Russian Linguistics, to the exclusion of the 
linguistics of other languages.  (And analogously for, say, 
ornithology.)  For this reason, in order to exclude such 
language-specific delimitations, the term "general linguistics" is 
sometimes used — though I would say that the modifier "general" here is 
redundant.  But I can't imagine a science of language (in general) that 
didn't compare languages.

Well okay, I remember getting my first linguistic education in a 
department that kind of tried to do that, by looking carefully at 
English and making inferences from English to "Universal Grammar". But 
even they have moved away from that and towards comparing diverse 
languages (as Anders pointed out a short while ago).  So it's not, or no 
longer, the notion of comparison per se that distinguishes an "us" from 
a "them".



On 28/02/2018 21:40, Balthasar Bickel wrote:
> Dear all
>
>> On 27 Feb 2018, at 22:10, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>>
>> (So far, at least one department of comparative linguistics in the relevant sense exists: at the University of Zurich, http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en.html).
> Just to avoid potential misunderstandings: our department in Zurich does not equate “comparative linguistics” with “typology”. We intend  “comparative linguistics” in a broad sense of comparative research that includes various kinds of historical/evolutionary linguistics (qualitative and quantitative), various kinds of typology (again qualitative and quantitative), cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, cross-linguistic anthropological linguistics, and even cross-species comparison of human language with other communication systems.
>
> In terms of daily research and teaching we don’t see much difference anymore between historical/evolutionary linguistics and typology, so we don’t really care about the traditional associations that the label “comparative linguistics” has.
>
> Best,
>
> Balthasar
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-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
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