Subject: typological method

pace fritz newmeyer , there has been extensive discussion of the methodological issues that he raises . ( these remarks are independent of any assessment of johanna nichol 's book that fritz referred to , incidentally . ) first , good typological work devotes a substantial amount of effort to defining and delimiting what sorts of constructions should or should not belong to a particular structural type . good examples are many of dryer 's papers ( e . g . dryer 1989a , 1989b , 1992 ) , koptjevskaja - tamm 1990 : ch . 1 - 3 on nominalizations , stassen 1985 : ch . 2 , 4 on comparative and ' chaining ' constructions , and haspelmath 1993 : ch . 2 on indefinite pronouns . more generally , the discussion of the proper typological markedness criteria in croft 1990 : ch . 4 - 6 is an attempt to provide some * general * structural criteria for a large class of cross-linguistic phenomena ( see for example the formulation of the structural consequences of hopper & thompson 1980 's transitivity hypothesis on p . 131 , or the application of the criteria to the syntactic category problem in croft 1991 : ch . 2 - 3 ) . delimiting and classifying the phenomena to be analyzed is not a simple descriptive task ; in fact , it raises some of the most interesting issues in typological analysis , and have hardly been ignored in the typological literature . second , with respect to basicness for a language type in particular , in the passage from croft 1990 that fritz referred to ( pp . 33-36 ) , i argued that typologists had moved from classifying languages typologically to classifying constructions typologically , and that that was a good thing . nevertheless , i suggested some general criteria for determining a " basic " language type . and despite my reservations about identifying " basic " language types , it has to be said that in the great majority of cases , defining a " language type " instead of a " construction type " is not terribly difficult . matthew dryer ( p . c . ) has observed that inspection of texts generally tells you very quickly what the " word order type " of a language is . in my own experience , in a study where i am comparing the syntax of prenominal and postnominal modifiers , i am quite frustrated at how difficult it is to find languages where a modifier freely occurs both pre - and postnominally . of course , identification of " basic " or other types depends on what resources you have available to you ( quality of grammatical descriptions , availability of texts / language consultants etc . ) as well as what phenomenon you are studying ( e . g . word order or head marking [ easier ] vs . relative order of modifiers or the syntax of nonrestrictive modification [ harder ] ) . but for most studies it is not an insurmountable problem , although there always some problematic cases . third , the sampling problem * has * been discussed at some length by typologists ( besides bell 1978 's seminal article , see also dryer 1989c , perkins 1989 , croft 1990 : 18-25 , rijkhoff et al . 1993 ) . the issues are too complex to go into here at length . but it should be pointed out that the issues fritz raises apply to different sorts of samples with different purposes in mind . the question of how independent particular instances are have to do with probability samples ( see in particular the dryer , perkins and croft references for discussion of these problems ) . note in particular that the stability of the phenomenon being studied is an important factor : the less stable it is , the more likely cases are historically independent . the question of coming across rare types pertains to variety samples ( see in particular rijkhoff et al . ) . some studies ( e . g . tomlin 1986 , koptjevskaja - tamm 1990 , haspelmath 1993 ) draw on a very large variety sample and then select a stratified probability sample from it for the appropriate generalizations . dryer 's sampling technique attempts to combine the needs of variety and probability samples into a single sampling procedure . i should also add that with the shift towards dynamic ( diachronic ) interpretations of synchronic typological patterns , the examination of cognate phenomena in related languages , and the comparison of " nonbasic " as well as basic typological strategies , becomes another important method of analysis . that means that to some extent , the problems of basic vs . nonbasic types in a single language , and of historical relatedness of data sets , can be avoided - - - in fact , exploited - - - in modern typological analysis . bill croft references : bell , alan . 1978 . language samples . universals of human language , vol . 1 : method and theory , ed . joseph h . greenberg , charles a . ferguson and edith a . moravcsik , 123-156 . stanford : stanford university press . croft , william . 1990 . typology and universals . cambridge : cambridge university press . - . 1991 . syntactic categories and grammatical relations : the cognitive organization of information . chicago : university of chicago press . dryer , matthew . 1989a . plural words . linguistics 27 . 865-95 . - . 1989b . article - noun order . cls 25 . 84-97 . - . 1989c . large linguistic areas and language sampling . studies in language 13 . 257-92 . - . 1992 . the greenbergian word order correlations . language 68 : 81 - 138 . hopper , paul and sandra a . thompson . 1980 . transitivity in grammar and discourse . language 56 . 251-299 . koptjevskaja - tamm , maria . 1988 . a typology of action nominal constructions . stockholm : university of stockholm . perkins , revere d . 1989 . statistical techniques for determining language sample size . studies in languagea013 : 293-315 . rijkhoff , jan , dik bakker , kees hengveld & peter kahrel . a method of language sampling . studies in language 17 . 169-203 . stassen , leon . 1985 . comparison and universal grammar . oxford : basil blackwell . tomlin , russell . 1986 . basic word order : functional principles . london : croom helm . dept of linguistics , u manchester , oxford rd , manchester m13 9pl , uk w . croft @ manchester . ac . uk fax : + 44-61 - 275 3187 phone : 275 3188
