Typological classification is the process of describing the various linguistic types found across languages for some grammatical parameter, such as grammatical number or the formation of relative clauses. Typological classification is historically the first manifestation of typology in modern linguistics, starting with the morphological classification of languages in the nineteenth century. The notion of a linguistic type has changed somewhat since that time, particularly under the impact of structural linguistics (the term ‘typology’ was first used in linguistics in 1901; Gabelentz 1901/1972:481). The following section will describe the current concept of a linguistic type, or strategy as it is sometimes called, while the concluding section will discuss morphological typology and the major conceptual changes that have occurred in the evolution of the concept of a linguistic type.

The usual procedure for initiating a cross-linguistic comparison of a particular grammatical phenomenon for the purposes of a typological analysis is to survey the range of structures used for the phenomenon in question. In morphosyntax, the phenomenon is generally a grammatical construction, defined on an external basis precisely because of the degree of structural variation actually found in languages (see §1.3). Thus, given a particular external definition of a category, such as that proposed for the relative clause, one may then classify the linguistic structures found across languages to express or manifest that external definition. These structures are called types or strategies. This is typology in the first sense, a cross-linguistic structural classification of morphosyntactic phenomena.