Lesson 2: Typology

Definition:

Comparative linguistics often involves the examination of language typology, which categorizes languages based on their structural features. In other words, typology is the classification of languages or language components of languages based on shared formal characteristics. This can help linguists understand the broader patterns of language evolution

Key Concepts

Morpheme
Affixes
Analytic and Synthetic Languages
Isolating
Agglutinative
Fusional
Polysynthetic

Introduction

What exactly is meant by typology in the context of linguistics? In the most general sense, typology is

The classification of languages or components of languages based on shared formal characteristics

Here is a short overview and definitions of the key concepts:

Morpheme: The smallest unit in a language that contains meaning.
Affixes: Morphemes that are attached at the beginning or the end of a root word, for example in the word “disgracefulness”, “dis-“ is a prefix and “-ful” and “-ness” are suffixes.
Analytic language: Concepts and grammatical information is divided into root/stem words with added prepositions, postpositions, and modifiers. Affixes are used only rarely. Sentences follow a relatively strict word order.
Synthetic language features: Concepts and grammatical information is most often encoded in bound morphemes, as for example the plural “s” that is added to English nouns.
Isolating: A language that has no affixes is called isolating.
Agglutinative: A language that mainly uses bound morphemes for compound ideas. Each morpheme generally has one meaning or function.
Fusional: As agglutinative, fusional means that additional grammatical information is encoded in a bound morpheme. However, in this case more than one type of information can be encoded in one morpheme. For example, in the Spanish verb “compro” the morpheme “-o” at the end contains the information that this is the first-person singular form, as well as the present tense.
Polysynthetic: languages that are polysynthetic typically have very long “sentence-words”. Instead of isolated words, a great number of affixes can be added to a root word to express complex ideas.

As a point of departure, it is important to note that typology is not a theory of grammar.

There are three significant propositions packed into the dense definition in:

(a) Typology utilizes cross-linguistic comparison,

(b) typology classifies languages or aspects of languages, and

These parts of the definition will be examined one at a time with an eye to better understanding what is involved in performing language typology.

Proposition 1: Typology involves cross-linguistic comparison

Consider the following data:

I met the man who taught you French.
The dog who licked Cora has become her friend.
I sent the story to the newspaper that your mother owns.

From these sentences, we could form the generalization that English relative clauses (in bold type) follow the nouns that they modify (in italics). This description is important to someone investigating English, but it is incomplete as a typological claim because it is not grounded in a cross-linguistic perspective. Instead, in a typological approach, we expect to find a description such as “English is typical in placing relative clauses after the nouns which they modify”. Note that to employ a term such as “typical” properly, one must first have gathered data on relative clauses from a representative sample of the world's languages.

Exercise

Think about another language that you speak. Does it follow these general rules?

Find the worksheet below:

Mark the relative clauses and the words that they describe.

Worksheet

Video Input: What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners

Proposition 2: Typology involves classification of either (a) components of languages or (b) languages

In the first case – classification of components of language (a) – attention is directed toward a particular construction that arises in language, for example, reflexive verbs, oral stops, or discourse particles. Then, using cross-linguistic data, all the types of these specific phenomena are determined. The goal is to better comprehend how this facet of language operates by identifying the degrees of similarity and the degrees of variance that one finds among languages. There is also keen interest in determining whether there exist correlations between the various patterns that one finds in a language.

For instance, we might do a typological investigation on oral plosive sounds.These are sounds, also called “stops,” that are produced when the airstream is completely impeded in the vocal tract, as in English [p] and [g]. If we were to examine the distribution of oral stops in the world's languages, we would immediately be struck by the fact that all languages have at least one plosive sound. Thus, we would have discovered a universal about sound systems in human language. It is important to realize that this fact is not a logical requisite for language because we can easily conceive of a language that does not have any oral plosives. Therefore, our empirical discovery that all languages have at least one stop leads to an ontological question: Why should language be structured in this way? We return to the problem of explanation presently, but first let us determine what other sorts of facts about stops we would learn from our typological investigation.

There are over 50 distinct oral stops that occur in language, but individual languages utilize only a small proportion of this universal set, with languages such as Punjabi (Indo-Iranian: India, Pakistan), which has 24 plosives, being highly exceptional in how many plosives it contains (Gill and Gleason 1963). As we continued our investigation, we would further discover that plosive sounds are not equally distributed in the languages of the world. Some are extremely common, such as [p], [t], and [k]. In fact, nearly all languages have at least one of them. In contrast, some plosives are relatively rare, such as the voiced uvular stop [G], which is found, for example, in Somali (Cushitic: Somalia). We now might notice certain intriguing facts about our emerging typology of plosives such as “unexpected” gaps. For instance, plosives created by bringing the lower teeth into contact with the upper lip are nonexistent, even though they are physically possible to articulate. Finally, we might identify certain stops as being “dominant”, for example, the voiceless alveolar stop [t] appears to be an especially dominant plosive sound because, if a language has only two voiceless stops, one of them is bound to be [t].

From this simple typological study we have learned a host of important facts about sound systems. Not all these facts are of the same sort. For example, some were absolute universals (e.g., all languages have at least one stop); some were universal tendencies (e.g., almost all languages have [p], [t], or [k]); and some were implicational universals (e.g., if a language has two voiceless stops, then one is a [t]). Implicational universals have played a particularly prominent role in typology because they commonly suggest connections between two or more aspects of language.

Proposition 3: Typology is concerned with classification based on formal features of language

There are many conceivable ways that one can talk about relationships between languages. For instance, languages can be placed into classes on the basis of their genetic relationships. Was this our concern, we would group together all languages that demonstrably have a common origin. In doing so, we would produce a set of “language families”: Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Manchu-Tungus, and so on. In other circumstances we might choose to classify languages by their geographic location. We might then talk about Australian languages or the languages spoken in Northwestern Nigeria. In additional cases, we might classify languages in terms of demographic features, for example, languages with over 100 million speakers.

Of course, all these methods of classification are useful devices for a particular goal. Their potential significance should be quite clear. They are not typology, however. Typologists, in contrast, classify languages in terms of the forms out of which a language is composed – its sounds, morphemes, syntax, or discourse structure.

This is not to say that these other kinds of classification are entirely unrelated to typology. The strong association between typological and genetic classification is most obvious. It is no surprise that Spanish (Spain and Latin America) and French (France) both have articles that reveal gender or that they both have subject agreement marked on verbs because we know that both languages have inherited these traits from Latin. The typological similarity of the two languages is a function of their genetic association.

The relationship between typology and areal classification is less well understood. To what extent the structure of one language can be affected by the languages around it is an area of intense current research. There is plenty of evidence, however, to demonstrate that grammars are flexible enough to adopt some features of other languages that are close to them spatially. One well-known instance of a group of languages that share grammatical features because of their geographic proximity is found in the Balkans. In this region (often referred to as a Sprachbund), one encounters among other languages Albanian (Albanian: Albania), Bulgarian (Balto-Slavic: Bulgaria), and Rumanian (Balto-Slavic: Romania), all of which come from different subfamilies of Indo-European. Certain linguistic patterns permeate the languages in this area despite their different genetic affiliations. For example, many of them have definiteness marked by a suffix on the noun:

Data from Bynon (1977) in Whaley (1997)

What is amazing about this particular example is that the use of suffixes to mark definiteness is not a trait of any of the language branches from which the languages come. Indeed, the origin of this formal trait is still somewhat of a mystery. What is crucial for present purposes, however, is that, from a genetic standpoint, none of these languages are expected to employ this morphological strategy. The fact that they share it can only be due to their geographical connection.

This type of linguistic similarity between languages of different genetic stock is particularly common in speech communities where two or more languages coexist and there is a high degree of multilingualism; in such cases, it is well attested that parts of the grammar of one language can be adopted by another (see Myers-Scotton 1993 in Whaley (1997)).

Therefore, although typological classification is a different sort of procedure than are genetic, geographic, and demographic classifications, it must be recognized that the typological characteristics of languages can be greatly influenced by these other factors.

One final point about typology's focus on the formal features of language requires comment. “Formal features” are the chunks of information that one finds in language, its phrases, sentences, and so on. These features are, of course, used to convey meaning. Consequently, typologists have always been concerned with semantic categories, such as “tense,” “agent,” or “gender,” and how these categories are manifested by the formal units of language. Therefore, the emphasis on formal features in the definition of typology given previously should not be taken to exclude semantic considerations.

Video Input: What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners

Discussion

Discuss where to locate German on the spectrum of Analytic vs. Synthetic Languages.

Did you finish? German, just as Latin, Spanish, Greek, Russian, and the majority of Slavic languages, which are characterized by free word order, is considered towards the synthetic end of the spectrum. German also has analytic construction, so it can also be classifies as a mixed type.

Word order: SVO or SOV?

The relative order of subject, verb, and object in declarative sentences with nominal subject and object can vary from SVO, to SOV, to VSO. To explain better, let's take an example by translating the phrase:

"The cat (subject, S) ate (verb, V) the mouse (object, O)" in English, Turkish and Arabic:

English: the cat (S) ate (V) the mouse (O)
Turkish: kedi (S) fareyi (O) yedi (V)
Arabic: akala (V) l-qiṭṭu (S) l-fa’ra (O)

What conclusions about the word order could you draw from this example?

While English has an SVO order (as Italian and German in this example), Turkish has an SOV order ('the cat the mouse ate') and Arabic a VSO order ('ate the cat the mouse'). In subordinate clauses, basic German word order is SOV (subject, object, verb). All Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages belong to the SVO type (with the exception of German, which follows the SOV order), while the SOV type includes, for example, Japanese, Turkish.

Think about other languages you might speak, what kind of word order do they have? Do they also follow the SVO order or do they follow a different one?

Exercise

Rearrange the words to form grammatically correct sentences:

1) like - picture - my - I

2) meet - our - We - friends - school - at

3) newspaper - the - bus - Ben - reads - in - the

4) present - shop - He - buys - a - in - a

5) eat - hotel - I - evening - my - the - a - in - dinner - in

6) challenge - a - as - viewed - often - is - learning - language - a

7) grammar - perfect - her - with - essay - impressed - was - teacher - the

Did you finish the exercise? 1) I like my picture 2) We meet our friends at school; We meet friends at our school 3) Ben reads the newspaper in the bus 4) He buys a present in a shop 5) In the evening I eat my dinner in a hotel 6) Learning a langauge is often viewed as a challenge 7) The teacher was impressed with her perfect grammar essay

Final thought for this lesson

Throughout this lesson, we have explored what typology is, the classification of languages or language components of languages based on shared formal characteristics. This leads to the division into the three propositions of (a) cross-linguistic comparison, (b) classification of languages or components of it, and (c) formal features of language, which can be explored through relative clauses, patterns and tendencies, shared formal features due to geographical factors and language contact, word order, and much more.

While some patterns and empirical findings hint towards universal features across all languages, they also pose the question as to why languages are structured in this way. With some features, e.g. certain plosives ([p], [t], and [k]) being extremely common, other plosives are relatively rare and leave "gaps" even though they can be articulated. These universals, be it absolute, tendencies, or implicational, have been important in suggesting connections between multiple aspects of different languages. This has lead to the discovery and categorizations of languages sharing features, such as the Sprachbund, which is influenced solely by their geographical connection.

Take Home Questions

Define language typology; What does language typology look at?
Name an example of a typological feature of a language.
Explain the difference between analytic and synthetic languages. Name one example each.
Explain the spectrum of analytic and synthetic languages (e.g. Isolates vs. Polysynthetic).

continue with the 3rd lesson

Sources

Content

Whaley, Lindsay J. (1997). Introduction to typology: the unity and diversity of language. London, UK: SAGE.

Videos

ariinbeijing (2017, June 23). What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/QxrDNRhYFyI?si=G_fBMn9Wxi0tISqH

Tom Scott (2015, June 11). Long and Short Words: Language Typology [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/bxARj07jFp0?si=KBoqPYTsrnSStlA1