Linguistic Typology

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Linguistic Typology is an introduction to the cross-linguistic study of grammatical features of language. The course covers formal and functional approaches to the typology of phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena. Students will be introduced to 1) key topics in typology including word order, correlations and sampling methodology, grammatical relations, and phonological inventories; 2) the status of universals in typology, and formal and functional explanations for those universal patterns; 3) influential frameworks and tools for typological research including implicational hierarchies, semantic maps, canonical typology, and combinatorial typology. Each student will choose one language to work with, and as we discuss each linguistic phenomenon in the course, students will write up descriptions of how that particular phenomenon works in their language of study, comparing how the features of that language fit into cross-linguistic patterns.