Linguistic Typology

Objective

The objective of this elective module is to familiarize students with language diversity and the methods of its study. This elective is especially related to the specialization in General Linguistics, whose typological aspects it deepens and develops, but it can also be combined with all other specializations. Combining this elective with a specialization in English, German, Romance, or Dutch Linguistics is particularly useful for students who wish to study their subject languages from the comparative and typological perspective. Depending on the individual focus, the contents of this module are particularly suitable for combination with the elective modules “Language and Culture,” “Multilingualism and Language Acquisition,” and “Linguistic Variation.”

Course contents

Contents of the module include theory, methodology, and results of language typological research at all linguistic levels of description. The focus is not only on the diversity of the world's languages in areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics/discourse, but also on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of describing and explaining this diversity. Participants will gain insights into the theoretical foundations and problems of language comparison, covering questions of language universals, challenges in comparability, and the determination of tertium comparationis. Different methods of language comparison will be covered, both qualitative corpus-based methods with a small number of languages and quantitative methods that allow for a statistical study of larger numbers of languages. The basics of typological classification of languages and the main typological variables (phoneme inventories, case, gender, argument alignment, voice systems, tense, evidentiality, lexical typology, word order, complex sentences, etc.) are taught. The acquired knowledge of typological diversity will be practically applied in the practical in which a non-Indo-European language far from the standard European type will be studied and analyzed for its typological properties and classification features.

Learning outcomes

This module will qualify students for the independent application of typological research methods and the independent theoretical interpretation of data. Students will have developed an awareness of the enormous diversity of languages at all levels of the language system. They will have mastered the methods of classifying languages on the basis of extensive grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic criteria. The ability to classify languages will have been strengthened by practice in the determination of variables, sampling, data collection, statistical or qualitative evaluation, and typological analysis. Students will be able to apply their overall knowledge in linguistics to the issues of typology and to expand their linguistic perspective with the recognition of language variation and language universals. They will have mastered the principles of language comparison and will be able to apply them in their own areas of specialization.