What is typology?

The term typology has a number of different uses, both within linguistics and without. The common definition of the term is roughly synonymous with ‘taxonomy’ or ‘classification’, a classification of the phenomenon under study into types, particularly structural types. This is the definition that is found outside of linguistics, for example in biology, a field that inspired linguistic theory in the nineteenth century.

The most unassuming linguistic definition of typology refers to a classification of structural types across languages. In this definition, a language is taken to belong to a single type, and a typology of languages is a definition of the types and an enumeration or classification of languages into those types. We will refer to this definition of typology as typological classification. The morphological typology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an example of this use of the term. This definition introduces the basic connotation that the term typology has in contemporary linguistics: typology has to do with cross-linguistic comparison of some sort. Methodological issues in cross-linguistic comparison will be discussed in §§1.3–1.6, while chapter 2 will be devoted to the notion of a linguistic type, including morphological typology, and its refinements in twentieth-century research.

A second linguistic definition of typology is the study of patterns that occur systematically across languages. We will refer to this definition of typology as typological generalization. The patterns found in typological generalization are language universals. The classic example of a typological universal is the implicational universal.