Some thoughts on the reason for the lesser status of typology in the USA as opposed to Europe

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the different status that typology has in American linguistics as opposed to European linguistics. The historical roots of the difference lie in both structural and generative linguistics, in the contrasts between post-Bloomfieldian structuralism in the US vs. Praguean structuralism in Europe, and in the extent of the influence of generative grammar on the two continents. A significant aspect of the linguistics of the twentieth century was the struggle between description and theory, the conflict between the desire to capture the “structural genius” of languages (Sapir 1921) and the desire to capture what is universal in human language. This struggle played out rather differently in Europe and in the USA, and this contrast, I believe, is a telling factor in the current situation in which language typology is a much more significant and influential area of linguistics in Europe than it is in the USA. Modern linguistics began in the USA as a reaction to the traditional grammar assumption that its Latin-based model was the appropriate framework for the description of all languages and to the evolutionary (and racist) interpretations of linguistic differences that were prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., Powell 1880, 1891). Franz Boas laid out a framework for linguistic analysis which made no assumptions about the structure of the language to be investigated and which defined the descriptive categories to be used in terms of the structural properties of the languages themselves (Boas 1911). His most influential student, Edward Sapir, continued the development of this analytic framework in his 1921 book, Language, but unlike Boas, he was explicitly interested in crosslinguistic comparison, including a chapter on language typology which challenged some of Boas’ assumptions about crosslinguistic variation (Sapir 1921: 128–129), while continuing the repudiation of the racist interpretations of linguistic differences (Sapir 1921: 130–132). After Sapir’s and Boas’ deaths in 1939 and 1941, respectively, the dominant form of structural linguistics in the USA rejected Boas’ and Sapir’s cognitive perspective, as well as Sapir’s