Typological classification

Translations

classificazione tipologica | Typologie linguistique | Sprachtypologie

Article

A typological classification of languages entails grouping languages who shared similar features according to a specific structural criterion (cf. Croft 2002, 1-3). As such, it is opposed to genealogical classification, in that it studies and classifies similarities that do not depend on inheritance, but rather on universal or prevalent tendencies.

Typological criteria include the morphological one (which was the first to be discussed in scholarship, already in the XVIII century), the syntactic one, and the phonological one (although in principle other criteria may be employed as long as they provide effective and significant grouping).

Morphological typology describes the meaning-to-form ratio of morphemes, with the main types of languages being the inflected ones (grammatical morphemes may contain complex meanings), the agglutinative ones (one grammatical morpheme generally contains one semantic trait), the isolating ones (no form of grammatical inflection is present), and the polysynthetic ones (several lexical morphemes are merged in single word-sentences).

Syntactic typology describes the architecture of unmarked phrases or clauses, or, using a similar but equivalent definition, the parameter of head-complement directionality. Languages may have an Object-Verb order, or a Verb-Object order; a Preoposition-Noun order, or a Noun-Preposition order; etc. In general, languages in which the phrase head is final can be easily described as head final, and, based on Greenberg's implicational universals, they would tend to feature a set of consistent structures (Object Verb, Noun Postposition, Modifier Noun); conversely, head initial languages will exhibit the opposite orders.

Phonological typology classifies languages based on some features of their phonemic inventory.

In situations of contact, the typological profile of one language may change due to the influence of another one.

Examples

An example of contact-induced typological shift in the Ancient Near East is offered by the syntactic typology of Akkadian, which exhibits verb-final clauses, even though it has head-initial appositional phrases and head initial noun phrases. In general, Semitic languages are quite consistently VO languages, as shown in the following example from Arabic: أكل الملك تفاحة 'akala al malik tufa'hat^an The king ate an apple This change was in all likelihood triggered by the influence of Sumerian (Deutscher 2007, 20-21).

In Anatolia, Goedegebuure (2008) proposed that a similar inconsistency in the VO-correlated structures of Hattian may have been due to the co-existence with one or more Indo-European languages such as Hittite, Palaic and Luwian.

References

Croft, W. 2002. Typology and Universals, Cambridge. Deutscher, G. 2007. Syntactic Change in Akkadian The Evolution of Sentential Complementation, Oxford. Goedegebuure, P. 2008, Central Anatolian languages and language communities in the Colony period: A Luwian-Hattian symbiosis and the independent Hittites, in Jan G. Dercksen (ed.), Anatolia and the Jazira during the Old Assyrian period, Leiden, pp. 137-180.