There’s a common misconception in linguistics that sets “language typology” against “linguistic theory.” While Dryer (2006) has argued against this, the idea persists, prompting a renewed discussion. Ultimately, the term “typology” may have outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with “Comparative Linguistics”. This shift is also beneficial because “typology” carries different meanings in other academic fields.
Consider these titles from books and journal papers that incorrectly present “typology” and “theory” as equivalent concepts:
- Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-verbal predication: Theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Hewson, John & Bubenik, Vít. 1997. Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: Theory, typology, diachrony. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Polinsky, Maria & Robert Kluender. 2007. Linguistic typology and theory construction: Common challenges ahead. Linguistic Typology 11(1). 273–283.
- Van Langendonck, Willy. 2008. Theory and typology of proper names. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Zimmermann, Malte & Féry, Caroline (eds.) 2010. Information structure: Theoretical, typological, and experimental perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Rolle, Nicholas. 2018. Grammatical tone: Typology and theory. PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley.
This list could easily be expanded, demonstrating a widespread tendency in the field. But what exactly is wrong with contrasting “theory” and “typology”?
The term “theory” is generally opposed to “practice/application” (as in Leibniz’s “theoria cum praxi”) or “experiment/data”. We often discuss experimental methods or corpus data versus the theoretical interpretation of that data. However, how can language typology be categorized as “practice” or “data”? “Typology” inherently involves classification, and any data classification is a theoretical endeavor. Therefore, language typology is fundamentally a theoretical pursuit. (While not all theoretical linguistics is typological, language-specific studies are also theoretical if they move beyond mere data collection and lack applied goals.)
If typology is indeed theoretical, what do linguists who use “typology and theory” in their titles actually mean?
It’s likely this confusing terminology stems from the prominence of theories in linguistics that aim to explain cross-linguistic similarities by positing a hypothetical, genetically determined grammar blueprint – often termed “universal grammar.” These nativist theories gained traction from the 1960s onwards, suggesting that core grammatical features are pre-set and largely consistent across languages (e.g., Chomsky 1965; Chomsky & Halle 1968). Since the 1980s, these ideas have been increasingly applied to global linguistic diversity (e.g., Baker 2001; Holmberg 2017), frequently under the “Principles and Parameters” framework (Huang & Roberts 2016). From this viewpoint, language classification might be seen as a preliminary, superficial step, followed by a “deeper analysis” guided by a grammar blueprint theory. Thus, a comparative study could be perceived as consisting of “typology” (= classification) and “nativist theory” (= explanation via grammar blueprint).
However, grammar-blueprint theories have not been particularly successful (cf. Newmeyer 2005; Haspelmath 2008; Boeckx 2014). While popular in the 1990s, the past two decades have seen a growing realization that the broad patterns identified since Greenberg (1963) are not easily explained by innate grammar elements (akin to chemical elements, as Baker proposed in 2001). No widely accepted major proposals have emerged, and none from the 1980s and 1990s have achieved universal agreement. These proposals are becoming less and less restrictive (and consequently, less explanatory). Furthermore, some younger generative linguists even view generative syntax merely as a descriptive tool. The theoretical status of the grammar blueprint idea remains unclear, and we lack testable claims, even with sufficient funding.
Of course, cross-linguistic distributions can be explained in various other ways (e.g., Moravcsik 2011; Schmidtke-Bode et al. 2019). The efficiency theory of asymmetric coding, for instance, has shown considerable promise. Crucially, none of these alternative theories are separate from “typology.” We don’t classify first and then explain; these are integrated parts of a unified theoretical endeavor. This contrasts with language-specific descriptions in dictionaries and grammars, which may not always draw on comparative insights, though they often do (link to example).
So, what should we call this field of study? I’ve long been uncomfortable with “typology,” partly due to the lack of consensus on whether to call the subdiscipline language typology or linguistic typology. I’ve previously suggested comparative grammar or comparative linguistics as better alternatives. I have started using these terms (e.g., example 1, example 2, and in my 2014 paper). The strength of “comparative linguistics” is its transparency, immediately conveying the field’s nature to those outside linguistics. Other disciplines have analogous fields, such as comparative law, comparative biology, and comparative religion.
Admittedly, “typology” is sometimes used to denote a specific community of linguists, such as those associated with the Association for Linguistic Typology (Croft 2003: 2). However, the unifying factor within this community seems to be primarily shared personal networks (e.g., intellectual lineage from figures like Greenberg and Givón). While informal labels for scholarly communities are useful, a formal term for them in book and journal titles seems unnecessary.
Furthermore, “typology” is confusing for another reason, beyond its mischaracterization as separate from “theory.” In biology, “typology” is strongly linked to Ernst Mayr’s (1959) distinction between typological thinking and population thinking (Sober 1980). Mayr argued that Darwin’s key contribution was moving away from rigid “types” towards a view of living beings as populations with dynamic interactions. The earlier typological thinking is also known as essentialism (Croft 2000: 13-17). Mayr described it as follows (emphasis original):
Darwinism refutes typology. From the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the general concept of the diversity of the world emphasized its invariance and stability. This view-point is called typology, or essentialism. The seeming variety, it was said, consisted of a limited number of natural kinds (essences or types), each one forming a class. The members of each class were thought to be identical, constant, and sharply separated from the members of other essences. Variation, in contrast, is nonessential and accidental. (Mayr 2000: 81)
(Typological and essentialist thought resembles the 19th-century approach of “transcendental anatomy,” which I’ve termed “morphism” (pure-form thinking) in a previous post. Amundson (1998) also refers to this as “typology.”)
While some linguists might view language types as fixed, pre-Darwinian species concepts, this is not the perspective of comparative linguists with a broad outlook on linguistic diversity today. Perhaps linguists in the Chomskyan tradition see the parameters of innate grammar blueprints as immutable, essentialist constraints on grammars. However, these scholars typically reject “typology” for their work, preferring “theoretical” and contrasting it with “typology,” as noted earlier.
If you find this all confusing, don’t worry; it is indeed complex.
The clearest path forward, I believe, is to abandon “typology” and adopt “comparative grammar” (always theoretical, except when contrasting languages for purely pedagogical purposes). Within comparative grammar research, we find diverse methods (e.g., small-scale vs. large-scale comparison) and various theories (e.g., functional-adaptive vs. biocognitive theories). Methods are likely complementary, while theories may compete. We might need nativist theories, or we might not. Without systematic comparison of theories, we won’t know – and if we persist with confusing terms like “typology,” we may not even understand what needs comparing.
References
Amundson, Ron. 1998. Typology reconsidered: Two doctrines on the history of evolutionary biology. Biology and Philosophy 13(2). 153–177. doi:10.1023/A:1006599002775.
Baker, Mark C. 2001. The atoms of language. New York: Basic Books.
Boeckx, Cedric. 2014. What Principles and Parameters got wrong. In Carme Picallo (ed.), Linguistic variation in the minimalist framework. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, Noam A. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam & Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman.
Croft, William. 2003. Typology and universals. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2006. Descriptive theories, explanatory theories, and basic linguistic theory. In Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench & Nicholas Evans (eds.), Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing, 207–234. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language, 73–113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2008. Parametric versus functional explanations of syntactic universals. In Theresa Biberauer (ed.), The limits of syntactic variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2014. Comparative syntax. In Andrew Carnie, Yosuke Sato & Dan Siddiqi (eds.), The Routledge handbook of syntax, 490–508. London: Routledge. https://zenodo.org/record/344909.
Holmberg, Anders. 2016. Linguistic typology. In Ian Roberts (ed.), The Oxford handbook of Universal Grammar, 355–376.
Huang, C.-T. James & Ian Roberts. 2016. Principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. The Oxford handbook of Universal Grammar. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199573776.013.14.
Mayr, Ernst. 1959. Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology. Evolution and anthropology: A centennial appraisal. Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington. (Also in: Conceptual issues in evolutionary biology, edited by Elliott Sober, 1994).
Mayr, Ernst. 2000. Darwin’s influence on modern thought. Scientific American 79–83.
Moravcsik, Edith A. 2011. Explaining language universals. In Jae Jung Song (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Typology, 69–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2005. Possible and probable languages: A generative perspective on linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten, Natalia Levshina, Susanne Maria Michaelis & Ilja A. Seržant (eds.). 2019. Explanation in typology: Diachronic sources, functional motivations and the nature of the evidence. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/220.
Sober, Elliott. 1980. Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism. Philosophy of Science 47(3). 350–383. doi:10.1086/288942.
