What is Phonological Typology?

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2014) What is Phonological Typology? Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Paper presented at the Workshop on Phonological Typology, University of Oxford, Somerville College, August 11-13, 2013 “Whatever typology is, it is on a roll at the moment and likely to continue.” (Nichols 2007: 236) Introduction The purpose of this paper is to address the question of what phonological typology is, can, or should be. To do so, one has to consider its relationship both to typology and to phonology in general. Such a task is complicated by at least three factors. First, there is no agreement on what typology is, let alone phonological typology. In an article entitled “What, if anything, is typology?”, the current president of the Association for Linguistic Typology writes: “Typology has the hallmarks of a mature discipline: a society, conferences, journals, books, textbooks, classic works, a founding father [Joseph H. Greenberg], and people who are called and call themselves typologists.” (Nichols 2007: 231) While most typologists would probably self-identify as studying the similarities vs. differences among languages, Nichols goes on to say that “despite these conspicuous identifying marks”, typology should not be recognized as a subfield of linguistics, but rather as “framework-neutral analysis and theory plus some common applications of such analysis (which include crosslinguistic comparison, geographical mapping, cladistics, and reconstruction)” (p.236). On the other hand, linguists who work in specific formal frameworks may engage in crosslinguistic comparison, but typically self-identify as syntacticians, morphologists, phonologists, etc. as they have less interest in issues of geography, language classification and history. The second problem in characterizing phonological typology is that phonology is no longer the unified subfield that it once was. The following assessment appears in a recent review of the multivolume Blackwell Companion to Phonology (van Oostendorp et al 2011): “Phonology is changing rapidly... Some phonologists collect the evidence for their theories using introspection, fieldwork and descriptive grammars, while other trust only quantitatively robust experimentation or corpus data. Some test phonological theory computationally... whereas others prefer to compare theories on conceptual grounds...” (Gouskova 2013: 173) Gouskova goes on to observe that the diversification within phonology has become so great that “it is becoming harder for for phonologists to talk to each other, for who can be a computer scientist, phonetician, neurolinguist and expert in adjacent fields such as morphology and syntax at the same time as having a command of the extensive literature on phonology- internal argumentation and phonological typology?” (p.173)