Introducing Language Typology

Chapter outline

In this chapter, the goals of language-typological research will be defined as studying similarities and differences among languages that do not stem from shared genetic relationship, language contact, or shared environmental conditions. Some basic research tools will be introduced: language-typological generalizations of various kinds, ways of constructing language samples, and sources for obtaining language data.

Goals

You are riding in a crowded elevator; next to you stand two people conversing in a foreign language. You don’t understand a word of what they are saying and couldn’t even repeat any of it: their speech strikes you as just plain noise. Yet, the two people obviously communicate. One person says something whereupon the other breaks into a peal of laughter; he then responds and the first person comes back with another round of what sounds like complete gibberish. How can these odd noises make any sense to anybody?

What you have just experienced is a true fact: languages are different. The following examples further illustrate how different they can be. (2), (3), and (4) are Polish, Hungarian, and Turkish translations of the English sentence in (1).