Introduction

This chapter discusses the contribution of linguistic typology to the study of language universals. Language universals research and linguistic typology are closely related fields, and are often not distinguished very clearly. Yet the difference between them can be characterized in the following way (Comrie, 1989): language universals define the restrictions on cross-linguistic variation; linguistic typology studies the restrictions on cross-linguistic variation; so typological research can be seen as the primary method used in uncovering language universals.

After a brief description of the way in which language samples are selected in cross-linguistic research in Section 2, the basic concepts and the methodology used in linguistic typology are introduced in Section 3, in which the notion of implicational hierarchy is taken as the point of departure. The implicational hierarchies uncovered through typological research are generally assumed to reflect true language universals, which means that they may be expected to show up in other linguistic domains as well, such as the historical development of languages, the process of language acquisition, language contact phenomena, and the distribution of linguistic phenomena within a single language. Section 4 of this chapter is dedicated to this issue. Conclusions are presented in Section 5. Wherever possible, the examples I present are taken from my own work, since this allows me direct access to the primary data.

Language sampling

Typological investigations make use of representative samples of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world.