Language typology and descriptive linguistics

Winter term 2021/2022
Tuesday, 16:45-18:15 in room C1 in Collegium Novum
30 contact hours (1 class a week)
ECTS credits: 3
Lecturer: Nicole Nau

Course description and learning outcomes

The class introduces students on an advanced level to goals and methods of linguistic typology and typologically informed description of languages, and presents case studies of grammatical phenomena found in the languages of the world. It will give answers to questions such as:

  • What do (all) languages have in common?
  • Where do languages differ, and how can similarities and differences be captured in a systematic way?
  • How can individual languages be described in a way that makes them comparable to others?

Students will learn techniques and tools for data presentation (selection and interlinear glossing of examples), data collection (using grammars, questionnaires, data bases, parallel texts; principles of sampling), and interpretation and presentation of results (implications, hierarchies, scales, semantic maps).

After successful completion of the class, students will

  • understand the essence of the functional-typological approach in modern linguistics and be able to use current research literature within this approach;
  • know about and be able to apply different criteria of language classification;
  • be able to collect and systematically present relevant information from known and unknown languages;
  • know about and be able to discuss various grammatical phenomena on a basic level and at least two phenomena in more detail, for example: gender, number, person, case, tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, causativity, word order, grammatical roles and relations, alignment types, relative clauses, clause combining;
  • be able to apply typological concepts to the analysis and description of a language other than English and in contrastive analyses of two languages
  • be able to design a typological study.

Work load and assessment criteria
Requirements for course completion (3 ECTS, zaliczenie)

  1. regular active participation in class, including exercises (20%)
    reading at home before and after classes, answering questions about texts (20%)
  2. written solutions to two of five given tasks (60%)

Basic bibliography (more detailed reading lists will be given in class)

1. Handbooks

Comrie, Bernard 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Croft, William 1990, 2003. Typology and Universals. Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Second edition 2003]

Dryer, Matthew & Haspelmath, Martin, eds. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. Dostępny online: http://wals.info/

Payne, Thomas E. 2006. Exploring language structure: A student’s guide. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Song, Jae Jung. 2001. Linguistic typology. Morphology and syntax. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Song, Jae Jung, ed. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shopen, Timothy (ed.). 2007. Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Second Edition. 3 Volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. An Introduction to Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

2. Articles (list will be continued)

Arkadiev, Peter M. forthcoming. Morphology in typology: historical retrospect, state of the art and prospects. To appear in Rochelle Lieber et al. (eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Morphology. June 2019 version on academia.edu

Dahl, Östen, and Bernhard Wälchli. 2016. Perfects and Iamitives: Two Gram Types in One Grammatical Space. Letras de Hoje 51 (3): 325. https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-7726.2016.3.25454.

Georgakopoulos, Thanasis, and Stéphane Polis. 2018. The Semantic Map Model: State of the art and future avenues for linguistic research. Language and Linguistics Compass 12 (2): e12270. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12270.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language 86(3). 663–687.

Zielenbach, Maria: Are “Nominative Experiencers” really a feature of Standard Average European? Haspelmath’s claim revised. Unpublished course paper available at academia.edu.