Typological universals
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P57
2025-12-01
52
Typological universals
According to Croft (2003: 1–2), the term ‘linguistic typology’ is used in three distinct ways to refer to three different types of approach that fall within the broader discipline of linguistic typology. The first approach, which he calls typological classification, involves the assignment of a given language to a single type, based on its properties in a certain area (morphology, word order and so on). The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century typological approach is a representative example, where the emphasis was on developing descriptive taxonomies. For example, in traditional morphological classification, a language is classified as belonging to the ‘isolating’ type if it lacks grammatical affixes, while a language is classified as belonging to the ‘agglutinating’ type if it has grammatical affixes that each encode a single grammatical feature.
The second approach within linguistic typology is what Croft calls typo logical generalisation. This involves the search for systematic patterns across languages (linguistic universals), and identifies what patterns of variation can be predicted to exist on the basis of those observed patterns. This approach has its roots in the work begun by Joseph Greenberg in the 1960s, and in emphasising the predictions that emerge from attested patterns about what is a possible human language goes a step further than the essentially taxonomic approach of typological classification.
The third approach within linguistic typology is what Croft calls functional typology. This modern approach rests upon typological generalisation, but goes a step further in developing a theoretical framework that seeks to set out explanations for the observed patterns. This approach is called ‘functional’ typology because it explains these patterns in terms of how language is used for purposes of communication. Functional typology has been developed by typologists such as Bernard Comrie, Talmy Givón, John Haiman, Paul Hopper and William Croft, among others.
Modern linguistic typology adopts large-scale cross-linguistic sampling as its methodology. The size of the sample varies according to the extent to which the phenomenon under investigation is widespread, as well as being con strained by practical considerations; the typical sample size is in the region of 100–200 languages (out of the estimated six thousand living languages in the world). It is important that the generalisations stated by typologists have statistical validity, otherwise they cannot be upheld. The languages that make up these samples are carefully selected, taking into consideration factors that might affect the reliability of the resulting generalisations, such as genetic relationships between languages and contact between neighbouring but genetically unrelated languages.
Linguistic typologists have discovered that, although it is possible to state certain properties that hold for all languages (unrestricted universals), cross linguistic variation is ubiquitous. However, typologists have also discovered that, while languages can and do vary, cross-linguistic variation is con strained, and these constraints can be stated in terms of implicational universals. Indeed, from the perspective of linguistic typology, it is the constraints on variation that make up the universals of language, rather than a set of universal principles that capture the properties that languages have in common (Universal Grammar). Let’s look more closely at the distinction between unrestricted universals and implicational universals, which makes this point clearer.
An unrestricted universal states that all languages show a particular pattern with respect to some structural feature, while the other logically possible pattern(s) are unattested. Croft (2003: 52) provides the example in (1).
All languages have oral vowels
This means that the other logical possibility, that there are languages without oral vowels, is not attested. This type of unrestricted universal pinpoints cross-linguistic similarity and is relatively uninteresting to typologists because it does not reveal a pattern in the same way that cross-linguistic differences do.
It is much more common for typologists to state implicational universals, which do not state that all languages show the same pattern with respect to a given phenomenon, but instead state the restrictions on the logically possible patterns, usually in the following format: ‘If language X has property Y, then it will also have property Z’. As Croft (2003: 54) points out, this type of uni versal pinpoints patterns in variation rather than similarity, since each impli cational universal sets out a set of distinct attested possibilities. Croft provides the example in (2), which was proposed by Hawkins (1983: 84, cited in Croft 2003: 53). This implicational universal rests upon the four logically possible patterns listed in (3).
(2) If a language has noun before demonstrative, then it has noun before relative clause.
(3) a. languages where both demonstratives and relative clauses follow the noun
b. languages where both demonstratives and relative clauses precede the noun
c. languages where demonstrative precedes and relative clause follows the noun
d. languages where demonstrative follows and relative clause pre cedes the noun
Observe that the implicational universal in (2) excludes the possibility described in (3d). In this way, the implicational universal states the limits on cross linguistic variation by restricting the possibilities to those described in (3a)–(3c), and entails an absolute universal by stating that the pattern in (3d) is unattested. In reality, most of the universals posited by typologists are of this kind, or indeed of a more complex kind. Croft describes the differences between typological and generative approaches as follows:
One of the major differences between the generative and typological approaches is what direction to generalize first. Given a grammatical phenomenon such as a relative clause structure in English, one could generalize in several directions. One could compare the relative clause structure with other complex sentence structures in English . . . and then generalize over these different structures in English. This is the classic structuralist-generative approach. Alternatively, one could compare relative clause structure in English with relative clause structure in other languages, and then generalize over relative clauses in human languages. This is the classic typological approach . . . the typologist begins with cross-linguistic comparisons, and then com pares typological classifications of different structural phenomena, searching for relationships. In contrast, the generative linguist begins with language-internal structural generalizations and searches for correlations of internal structural facts, and only then proceeds to cross linguistic comparison. (Croft 2003: 285)
A further important difference between functional typology and the generative approach is that functional typologists reject the idea of specialised innate linguistic knowledge (Universal Grammar). Instead, functional typology comes much closer to cognitive linguistics in orientation, in two important ways. Firstly, functional typology emphasises language function and use in develop ing explanations for linguistic phenomena. Secondly, functional typology appeals to non-linguistic aspects of cognition to explain the properties of language. For example, many typologists adopt some version of a semantic map model in accounting for typological patterns (Croft 2003: 133). A semantic map is a language-specific typological pattern, which rests upon a universal conceptual space or system of knowledge. We return to look at this idea in more detail at the end of Part III (Chapter 20).
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