Typology in the 21st century: Major current developments

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1. TYPOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE. Traditionally, typology was used as an alternative method in pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g. a language with a gender distinction exclusively in the first person singular. Over the past decade, typology has begun to emancipate itself from this goal and to turn from a method into a full-fledged discipline, with its own research agenda, its own theories, its own problems. What has reached center-stage is a fresh appreciation of linguistic diversity in its own right, and the new goal of typology is the development of theories that explain why linguistic diversity is the way it is — a goal first made explicit by Nichols’s (1992) call for a science of population typology, parallel to population biology. Instead of asking “what’s possible?”, more and more typologists ask “what’s where why?” Asking “what’s where” targets universal preferences as much as geographical or genealogical skewings, and results in probabilistic theories stated over sampled distributions. Asking “why” is based on the premises that (a) typological distributions are historically grown and (b) that they are interrelated with other distributions. Understanding distributions as historically grown goes back at least to Greenberg’s (1965; 1978) and Givon’s (1979) early calls for diachrony in typology and means that synchronic distributions, whether universal preferences or geographical clusterings, are seen as the product of type transitions and diachronic processes in general (also see Bybee 1988 and Hall 1988 for strong argumentation in this direction). It is a matter of current debate whether universal preferences result from preference principles that guide (or ‘select’) the result of diachrony (as assumed by, e.g. Nettle 1999, Kirby 1999, or Haspelmath 1999) or from locally motivated preferred pathways of change (as in the work of, e.g. Croft 2000, Bybee 2001, Blevins 2004, and in much of grammaticalization theory). On either view, the current distribution is understood as the product of history and the objects of inquiry are probabilities of change and the principles behind them. Understanding typological distributions as interrelated with, and partly grounded in other distributions reflects the finding that linguistic structures tend to be systema-