LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Typology

William Croft - 27 September 2002

Typology is the study of language universals by the empirical method of induction from a sample of diverse languages. Textbooks are available (Croft 2002, Comrie 1989). the most effective learning tool is for each student to "adopt" a reference grammar of an unfamiliar language; the languages used in a class should be genetically and geographically diverse. Descriptive exercises are based on the adopted grammars, and analytical exercises on data sets available on the Web.