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Linguistic variation & typology

Linguistic typology

 (or 

language typology

) is a field of 

linguistics

 that studies and classifies languages according to their structural and functional features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages.

[1]

 Its

subdisciplines

include, but are not limited to: qualitative typology, which deals with the issue of comparing languages and within-language variance; quantitative typology, which deals with the distribution of structural patterns in the world’s languages; theoretical typology, which explains these distributions; syntactic typology, which deals with word order, word form, word grammar and word choice; and lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology

Linguistic variation & typology

Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for the description and comparison of individual languages. A few examples appear below

.

Subject–verb–object

positioning

One set of types reflects the basic order of 

subject

, 

verb

, and 

direct object

 in sentences:

Object–subject–verb

Object–verb–subject

Subject–verb–object

Subject–object–verb

Verb–subject–object

Verb–object–subject

These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances.

[2]

In the 1980s, linguists began to question the relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location.

[3]

 Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle, and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German (

Ich

habe

einen

Fuchs

im

Wald 

gesehen

 - *"I have a fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch (

Hans 

vermoedde

dat

Jan Marie 

zag

leren

zwemmen

 - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh (

Mae

'r

gwirio

sillafu

wedi'i

gwblhau

 - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete"). In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of the auxiliary. German is thus SVO in main clauses and Welsh is VSO (and preposition phrases would go after the infinitive).

Many

typologists

[

who?

]

 classify both German and Dutch as 

V2

 languages, as the verb invariantly occurs as the second element of a full clause.

Linguistic variation & typology

Some languages allow varying degrees of freedom in their constituent order, posing a problem for their classification within the subject–verb–object schema. Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition.

[

example needed

]

 To define a basic constituent order type in this case, one generally looks at frequency of different types in declarative affirmative main clauses in pragmatically neutral contexts, preferably with only old referents. Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts. In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from the default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands. Additionally, freedom of word order may vary within the same language—for example, formal, literary, or archaizing varieties may have different, stricter, or more lenient constituent-order structures than an informal spoken variety of the same language.

On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself).

An additional problem is that in languages without living speech communities, such as 

Latin

, 

Ancient Greek

, and 

Old Church Slavonic

, linguists have only written evidence, perhaps written in a poetic, formalizing, or archaic style that mischaracterizes the actual daily use of the language. The daily spoken language of 

Sophocles

 or 

Cicero

 might have exhibited a different or much more regular syntax than their written legacy indicates.

Linguistic variation & typology

Morphosyntactic

alignment

Main article: 

Morphosyntactic

alignment

Another common classification distinguishes 

nominative–accusative

 alignment patterns and 

ergative–

absolutive

 ones. In a language with 

cases

, the classification depends on whether the subject (S) of an intransitive verb has the same case as the agent (A) or the patient (P) of a transitive verb. If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb. Bickel (2011) has argued that alignment should be seen as a construction-specific property rather than a language-specific property

.

Many languages show mixed accusative and ergative

behaviour

(for example: ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax). Other languages (called "

active languages

") have two types of intransitive verbs—some of them ("active verbs") join the subject in the same case as the agent of a transitive verb, and the rest ("stative verbs") join the subject in the same case as the

patient.

Yet other languages behave

ergatively

only in some contexts (this "

split

ergativity

" is often based on the grammatical person of the arguments or on the tense/aspect of the verb). For example, only some verbs in 

Georgian

 behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the 

perfective

 (aorist).

Linguistic variation & typology

Phonological

systems

Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in the structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages. This is accomplished by surveying and analyzing the relative frequencies of different phonological properties. These relative frequencies might, for example, be used to determine why contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives, as in English 

neat

 and 

need

, but occurs much more rarely among fricatives, such as the English 

niece

 and 

knees

. According to a worldwide sample of 637 languages,

[4]

 62% have the voicing contrast in stops but only 35% have this in fricatives. In the vast majority of those cases, the absence of voicing contrast occurs because there is a lack of voiced fricatives and because all languages have some form of plosive, but there are languages with no fricatives. Below is a chart showing the breakdown of voicing properties among languages in the aforementioned sample.

Linguistic variation & typology

Languages worldwide also vary in the number of sounds they use. These languages can go from very small phonemic inventories (

Rotokas

 with six consonants and five vowels) to very large inventories (

!

Xóõ

 with 128 consonants and 28 vowels). An interesting phonological observation found with this data is that the larger a consonant inventory a language has, the more likely it is to contain a sound from a defined set of complex consonants (clicks,

glottalized

consonants, doubly articulated labial-velar stops, lateral fricatives and affricates, uvular and pharyngeal consonants, and dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives). Of this list, only about 26% of languages in a survey

[4]

 of over 600 with small inventories (less than 19 consonants) contain a member of this set, while 51% of average languages (19-25) contain at least one member and 69% of large consonant inventories (greater than 25 consonants) contain a member of this set. It is then seen that complex consonants are in proportion to the size of the inventory.

Vowels contain a more modest number of phonemes, with the average being 5-6, which 51% of the languages in the survey have. About a third of the languages have larger than average vowel inventories. Most interesting though is the lack of relationship between consonant inventory size and vowel inventory size. Below is a chart showing this lack of predictability between consonant and vowel inventory sizes in relation to each other.

Linguistic variation & typology

Quantitative

typology

Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world. Major types of non-chance distribution include:

preferences (for instance, absolute and implicational 

universals

, semantic maps, and 

hierarchies

)

correlations (for instance, areal patterns, such as with a 

Sprachbund

)

Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic is true).

Linguistic variation & typology

Linguistic typology compares languages to learn how different languages are, to see how far these differences may go, and to find out what generalizations can be made regarding cross-linguistic variation. As languages vary at all levels, linguistic typology deals with all levels of language structure, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (see Part IV of this volume). Is this definition specific enough? Most linguistic disciplines have cross-linguistic comparison in the background, if not as their main method or object of inquiry (one probable exception is the radical structuralism mentioned in section 4 below). Even isolated descriptive traditions of individual languages, such as traditional descriptions of English, German, Russian, etc., are not free from cross-linguistic assumptions. Although rarely referring to them directly, they are all based on ideas about the structure of human language (often projected from Latin grammars), implicitly suggesting parallels between different languages. Yet these approaches are not typological, because they focus on one language, even when they borrow metalanguage applied to a different linguistic system

.

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Linguistic variation & typology

Typology is sometimes viewed as a member of a triad: historical linguistics vs. contact linguistics vs. linguistic typology. Each of the three does language comparison. But while historical and contact linguistics look for similarities motivated by common origins or geographical proximity, linguistic typology is said to look for similarities motivated by neither, probably reflecting some general properties of human cognition or the common communicative purpose all languages serve. For historical or contact linguistics, comparing languages is also the main source of empirical data; but while these linguistic methods compare languages that are genealogically or

areally

close, linguistic typology is traditionally based on data from unrelated languages.

But

there

is more to the difference between them than just ways of selecting the languages the data come from. Historical and contact linguistics are looking for similarities between languages, because it is the similarities that can be inherited and spread by contact.

Typologists

are keener on differences, because every new difference that is found extends our idea of the limits of cross-linguistic variation. Linguistic typology is interested in cross-linguistic similarities only inasmuch as they foreground limits to variation, while contact and historical linguistics peel differences away to arrive at what the languages have in common

.

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Linguistic variation & typology

Thus, when saying that most languages use either ergative or accusative alignments, the main message is that all other structurally possible patterns are infrequent. This is again about differences: some kinds of variation (understood as divergence from the known types) are rare or not attested. When looking at alignment variation in a group of genetically or

areally

related languages, historical or contact linguistics would be more interested in the dominant pattern of alignment in the group, explaining that by common historical origins; cases of parallel evolution are thoroughly filtered out (whenever possible). Another example that shows the status of similarities in typology is the approach towards the definition of word. Linguistic typology suggests that this concept is

crosslinguistically

universal (e.g. Dixon and

Aikhenvald

2002). But this is not intended to mean that all languages are similar in that they have a unit with the identical properties. On the contrary, any relevant typological research would study cross-linguistic variation of various parameters of the concept of word. The message is, again, how different the guises are under which the category is manifested in the languages of the world. Thus, while some other linguistic approaches also deal with diversity, this is not their main objective; most are interested in sifting out the diversity in order to find similarities. Linguistic typology is the study of linguistic diversity as such, an exploration of cross-linguistic variation as well as the rules that govern it and constraints that define its limits. It may be seen as looking for similarities, too—as when assigning languages to different types. But as a matter of fact, it deals with similarities only to sort them out and to form an idea about possible differences. To show this, let us contrast linguistic typology with another approach to

crosslinguistic

variation: the generative paradigm

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Linguistic variation & typology

Generative grammar is compared to linguistic typology in numerous publications (

Bybee

1998a,

Newmeyer

2005,

Haspelmath

2008a, Evans and Levinson (forthcoming), and some discussion in Linguistic Typology 11.1 (2007), to mention just a few recent ones). In the following few pages, a summary of the present author’s view is provided. See

Cristofaro

(this volume) on the different stances on language universals adopted by the two approaches, and

Polinksy

(this volume) for perspectives on convergence between linguistic typology and formal grammar. The generative approach starts from an observation about language acquisition. According to this observation, linguistic input available for a first language learner is utterly insufficient to build linguistic structures of the language he or she is going to speak. Not only are these structures extremely complex, but the set of possible utterances is unlimited, so that one may wonder how a child’s poor linguistic experience may prepare him or her for such a complex and infinite diversity. It is equally stunning how a child learns not to produce ungrammatical utterances, although he is extremely rarely, if ever, explicitly taught what is wrong. These structures and constraints cannot be fully innate, because if there is a mismatch between the languages someone’s (biological) parents speak and the linguistic environment someone is brought up in, his or her first language is determined by the

latter

.

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Linguistic variation & typology

To solve this problem, generative grammar posits a universal grammar which is not acquired through learning but is an innate property of the human mind, common to all humans and transmitted biologically in an invariable form. The objective of the generative study of language is to uncover this universal grammar and to explain how the diversity of actual linguistic structures observed in the languages of the world is derived from it. The existence of such universal grammar is thus a methodological prerequisite which is induced from one observation about language acquisition: the poverty of stimulus. Although some research on language acquisition calls the latter into question (

Tomasello

and Barton 1994,

Tomasello

,

Strosberg

, and Akhtar 1996,

Lacerda

2009), the proponents of generative grammar rarely defend it, most often taking it for granted. For this reason, below we will refer to the thesis about the poverty of stimulus, as well as the concept of an innate universal grammar which follows from it, as theoretical assumptions rather than empirical results. From the 1980s on, generative grammar has further specified its approach to cross-linguistic variation (Chomsky 1981,

Haegeman

1994). Universal grammar is no longer a set of universal rules with additional language-specific rules on top. It has become a set of principles—common to all human languages—with variable parameters accounting for cross-linguistic variation. Language learning is viewed as a tuning process that adjusts the parameters of the built-in universal grammar so as to match optimally the linguistic stimuli perceived by a child. Principles of universal grammar are common to all languages; it is the values of the parameters that vary

.

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