Description and contextualization of the subject

This advanced course in linguistic typology is part of the "Historical Linguistics and Typology" section. In this course, we will put in practice some of the skills necessary to conduct any kind of research in typology, as well as in any linguistic study including descriptive data of a language. Our goal is to perform a similar work to the one done in Basic Typology, albeit in the opposite direction; instead of fully describing typologically a specific language, the students will classify and characterize different languages according to a given pattern or feature, offering a reasoned characterization of the patterns in languages and adequate examples.

Learning outcomes of the subject

- Ability to identify structural patterns common to various linguistic systems, at a synchronic and diachronic level.

- Ability to understand and employ the standard terminology and methodologies in modern typology, as well as general descriptions of languages.

- Ability to elaborate academic documents and transmit properly contents and ideas within the field of linguistic typology and work with languages.

Ordinary call: orientations and renunciation

- Work in class: 25% of final grade

- Individual written exercises: 75% of final grade (25% each part)

Extraordinary call: orientations and renunciation

-Individual written exercises: 100% of final grade



This evaluation system is designed for face-to-face teaching and will be adapted in the event that we enter a new state of health emergency and have to go to virtual teaching. In this case, the updated version of the program and the new evaluation system will be posted in the Egela virtual classroom

Temary

Working with languages: detecting and describing patterns and their semantic values in the languages of the world:

Topic 1: methodological considerations about typological research: problems and solutions in the description and classification of languages. Finding and formatting adequate examples in linguistic descriptions;

Topic 2: ways of organizing sentence structure and predicate types (non-verbal and verbal predication) across languages. Valency decreasing and increasing constructions in the languages of the world (passive, impersonal, causative, antipassive, anticausative);

Topic 3: cross-linguistic patterns and semantic values of coordination, cosubordination, serial verbs and subordination.

In the 10 sessions, we will discuss the main topics of the course (linguistic patterns and features), assign and check the corresponding exercises. Exercises will be of different types:

WORK IN CLASS

1. Direct questions to be answered right in class.

2. “Unscramble” the examples: each set of typological patterns or features we will address will be accompanied of a set of clarifying examples from different languages of the world, supplied separately. However, the examples will be “scrambled” (in the wrong order!). The student’s task will consist in relating each example with the corresponding pattern or feature we want to illustrate, with the help of translations and glosses, which they need to understand and interpret. The students have to work in groups (in class); then we will put the results in common.

INDIVIDUAL (WRITTEN) EXERCISES

3. In the exercises corresponding to Topic 1, the student will do some exercises on the methodology of the study of languages. As for Topics 2, and 3, the student has to send me a written characterization of his/her two working languages, analysing the patterns studied in class and giving the right examples. I will provide the students with detailed guidelines about the written exercises, topic by topic, as well as a model of a written assessment including the two topics.

Bibliography

Compulsory materials

WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures online)



Haspelmath, M., M. S. Dryer, D. Gil, B. Comrie (eds.), 2005, The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford, Oxford UP.



Grambank (part of Glottobank): https://grambank.clld.org/



Descriptive grammars

Basic bibliography

Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Croft, William. 1990. Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Igartua, Iván. 2023. Fundamentos de tipología lingüística. Síntesis.

Pereltsvaig, Asya. 2017. Languages of the world: an introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge Un Press.

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

Song, Jae Jung. 2000. Linguistic Typology: Morphology and Syntax. Harlow: Pearson Education.

In-depth bibliography

Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2006 Serial Verb Constructions in Typological perspective. In Aikhenvald, A. & R.M.W. Dixon (eds.) Serial Verb Constructions. Oxford University Press.



Anderson, Stephen R. 2016. Synchronic Versus Diachronic Explanation and the Nature of the Language Faculty. Annual Review of Linguistics 2: 11-31



Aristar, Anthony R. 1991. On diachronic sources and synchronic pattern: An investigation into the origin of linguistic universals. Language 67/1: 1-33.



Bickel, Baltasar, Alena Witzlack-Makarewich, Taras Zakharko, Giorgio Iemmolo. 2015. Exploring diachronic universals of agreement: alignment patterns and zero marking across person categories. In Fleischer, Jürg, Elisabeth Rieken, Paul Widmer (eds.) Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 29–52.



Bisang, Walter. 2011. Grammaticalization and linguistic typology. In Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Bowern, Claire and Bethwyn Evans (eds.) 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. New York: Routledge.



Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: tense, aspect and modality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.



Bybee, Joan. 2006. Language change and universals. In R. Mairal and J. Gil (eds.) Linguistic Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 179–94.

Journals

Linguistic Typology



Studies in Language



Language



Folia Linguistica



Lingua

Links

Web resources



1) World Atlas of Language Structures: WALS.info



2) Grambank (part of Glottobank): https://grambank.clld.org/



3) SSWL: https://terraling.com/groups/7



4) Glottolog.org



5) Ethnologue.com



6) Linguistics universals of the University of Konstanz: https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/category/universals-archive/



7) Surrey Morphological Group (feature list): http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/features/



8) Matthew Dryer’s maps: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dryer/family_maps.htm



9) Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages (SSWL): https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/tools.php



10) DiACL (Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics): https://diacl.ht.lu.se/



11) SAILS (The South American Indigenous Language Structures): https://sails.clld.org/



12) APiCS (The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures): https://apics-online.info/contributions#2/30.3/10.0