Typology

Typology is used to cover two related types of investigations: (1) classifying languages based on shared grammatical properties that are not attributable to genealogical inheritance, and (2) identifying patterns in the distribution of grammatical properties across languages. Georg von der Gabelentz was the first to use the word “typology” to describe a discipline in this first sense, though typological thinking goes back hundreds of years before. Typology in the second sense, which is what dominates the modern typological literature, grows out of work by Joseph H. Greenberg on word order correlations (or universals). Universals are important because they allow for classifications of languages, but they are facts about human languages that need explanation. For this reason, typology has played an important part in linguistic theory, which aims to explain the range of possible human languages and why human languages are the way they are. Given its theoretical importance and the fact that almost any aspect of human language can be studied typologically, typology is a broad discipline that is of importance to every subfield of linguistics.