Linguistic Typology

Author(s): Bernard Comrie

Source: Annual Review of Anthropology , 1988, Vol. 17 (1988), pp. 145-159
Published by: Annual Reviews

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155909

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual
Review of Anthropology

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1988. 17:145-59
Copyright (? 1988 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY

Bernard Comrie

Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Californ

90089- 1693

INTRODUCTION

Nature and Goals

Not all who claim to be linguistic typologists agree on a definition of the fie
How should linguistic typology be delimited from neighboring fields such as
language universals and general linguistic theory? Here I adopt a general
characterization that captures the essence of what most practitioners believe
themselves to be doing.

CLASSIFICATION Any typology attempts to classify the individual entities

under discussion (in this case, languages). In some typological work,
classification seems to be the main rationale. During the 19th century, the
main kind of linguistic typology was so-called morphological typology-
classifying languages by how morphemes (minimal units of grammar) are
combined into words. Morphological typology advocated a basic three-way
classification of the world's languages. In isolating languages, each word
consists of a single morpheme; such languages do not combine morphemes
into words, as English does in cat-s, which is formed from the lexical
morpheme cat and the plural morpheme s. In an agglutinating language, a
word may in principle consist of a number of morphemes, but it is always
possible to segment these morphemes-i.e. each morpheme corresponds to a
string of one or more phonemes, as in Turkish ev-ler-im-de (house-PLURAL-
my-in) 'in my houses'. In the third type, fusional languages, the morphemes
that must be distinguished grammatically may be fused into a single phonolo-
gically unanalyzable formative; for instance, in Russian stol-ov 'of the
tables', while it is possible to segment off a stem stol- and an ending -ov

145
0084-6570/88/10 15-0145$02.00

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
146 COMRIE

(genitive plural), there is no way of further segmenting -ov into a part

indicating plurality and a part indicating genitive (cf genitive singular stol-a
and nominative plural stol-y). Morphological typology by no means leads to a
neat three-way classification, since languages are isolating, agglutinating, or
fusional to varying degrees; thus English is largely isolating (as in I eat the
meat with a fork), but also has some agglutination (e.g. cat-s as the plural of
cat), and even some fusion (e.g. my as the possessor form of I). While
morphological typology dominated linguistic typology during the 19th cen-
tury and even later, it lacks one ingredient considered essential by most
contemporary typologists: Its morphological distinctions are not correlated
with any other aspect of the language; they stand alone as an arbitrary
classificational criterion.1

CORRELATIONS Most cuffent typology crucially involves correlations

among different parts of a language's structure. I introduce a simple illustra-
tion here and treat more complex and interesting examples below. Consider
the order of subject, verb, and object in a clause. In some languages the basic
order is verb-subject-object, as in Welsh gwelodd y dyn y bachgen (saw the
man the boy) 'the man saw the boy'. Other languages have different orders,
such as English with subject-verb-object. While in some languages, preposi-
tions precede their nouns (as in Welsh gan y dyn and its English translation
with the man), in others postpositions follow the nouns [as in Turkish adam
ifin (man for) 'for the man']. Almost without exception, languages that have
verb-first clausal word order also have prepositions,2 although logic should
not keep languages combining verb-subject-object order and noun-
postposition order from being as common as the Welsh type. Thus two
aspects of structure that are logically independent of one another nonetheless
show a strong correlation. Correlations of this type form the backbone of most
current work in typology.
How far-reaching are such correlations? Bolder typologists attempt to draw
wide-ranging correlations. In extreme cases scholars attempt to subsume
almost the whole structure of a language under a single set of correlations;
typologies of this kind are called holistic. The most influential holistic
typology today is perhaps Klimov's (10), involving a trichotomy of nomina-
tive, ergative, and active languages. More cautious typologists correlate
narrower ranges of phenomena, paying greater attention to empirical jus-

'Some 19th-century morphological typologists attempted to correlate morphological ty

with stages of social evolution, in a way that proves empirically to be without foundation. It m
be possible to establish correlations between morphological structure and other aspects of
language structure, as was attempted by Sapir (17).
2This correlation is often cited as an exceptionless universal, but well-attested exceptions do
exist--e.g. Yagua, a language of the Amazon region of Peru (D. Payne, personal communica-
tion).

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 147

tification; such typologies may be called partial. Most of the typological

parameters discussed below define partial typologies.

BASES OF CLASSIFICATION It is useful to distinguish between typological

and other kinds of classification.
Ignoring pure chance, there are basically three reasons why two languages
might share a property; (a) The two languages may be descended from a
single ancestor language, as Spanish and Italian are descended from Latin. (b)
The two languages may have been in contact, one language borrowing the
feature in question from the other (or both borrowing it from a mutual contact
language). In some instances, similarities due to areal contact are so far-
reaching that we can speak of a linguistic area; I return to this notion (areal
typology) in the next section. (c) Finally, two languages may share a property
conferred by general characteristics of human language-i.e. by language
universals. The correlation between verb-subject-object and preposition-noun
orders, for instance, is found not only in Welsh in Western Europe, but also in
Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa, in Tongan in the South Pacific,
etc. It is found in languages that are not genetically related (or at least no more
closely related than languages with different word orders) and have never
been in areal contact. Similarities of this last type concern us here.
This interest in properties of language that are independent of genetic and
areal similarities links linguistic typology to the study of language universals.
For instance, the typological correlation between verb-first word order and
prepositions can be reformulated as an implicational universal: "If a language
has verb-first word order within the clause, then it is prepositional rather than
postpositional. "

Areal Typology
Linguistic typology, genetic classification, and areal classification are in
principle distinct enterprises. Thus a classification valid in one is no more
likely than any other arbitrary classification to be valid in either of the other
two. While linguists generally recognize this today, the three enterprises have
been confused in the past. Armenian was wrongly classified as an Iranian
language because the overwhelming similarities in vocabulary between Arme-
nian and the Iranian languages were not recognized as the result of Armenian
borrowing from various Iranian languages. The Uralic languages were
assigned to the same genetic family as the Turkic languages on the sole basis
of shared typological features, such as word order patterns.3 The problem is
complicated by the fact that the study of areal similarities among languages is

3There may be valid reasons for relating Uralic and Turkic languages genetically. Similarly,
although Armenian is not an Iranian language, it is distantly related to Iranian languages as a
separate branch of the Indo-European family.

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
148 COMRIE

often referred to as areal typology. For completeness, I include a brief

discussion of areal typology here. It is an undertaking distinct from linguistic
typology.
The classic example of a linguistic area (or sprachbund) is the Balkan
sprachbund, whose central members, Modern Greek, Bulgarian (and the
closely related Macedonian), Rumanian, and Albanian share a number of
features that are not shared by genetically more closely related languages (e.g.
Ancient Greek, other Romance languages in the case of Rumanian, and other
Slavic languages in the case of Bulgarian). One such feature is the loss of the
infinitive, so that 'I want to go' comes out as 'I want that I go' (2: Sect. 10.2;
16). Recently, Campbell et al (1) have argued that Meso-America provides an
even clearer example of areal convergence, with a number of striking features
cutting across genetic boundaries and absent from languages outside the area.
These features include: (a) a nominal possession construction of the type
'his-dog the man'-e.g. Quiche u-c'i: 2 le: acih; (b) use of relational
nouns-i.e. of nouns with possessive affixes to correspond to many English
prepositions-e.g. Pipil nu-wan 'with me', literally 'my-with'; (c) vigesimal
numeral systems-i.e. the translation of forty as 'two twenties', of fifty as
'two twenties and ten'; (d) absence of verb-last basic word order (even though
this is the usual basic word order in surrounding languages); and (e) a number
of semantic calques widespread in the area, such as the translation of boa
constrictor as 'deer-snake', of egg as 'stone/bone of bird'.
Another reason anyone interested in linguistic typology should be con-
versant with areal typology is that in elucidating the general principles of
language one must beware of including features that are merely characteristic
of an areal group. In some recent work on word order typology, for instance,
the order of attributive adjective and noun has been included as a special case
of the general order of dependent and head, leading to a putative correlation
of, for example, adjective-noun word order with object-verb word order. Yet
M. Dryer (Symposium of Sampling in Cross-linguistic Research, Linguistic
Society of America Annual Meeting, December 1987) has argued that this
correlation holds primarily for object-verb languages of Asia, while on other
continents object-verb languages either have predominantly noun-adjective
order or have both orders in roughly equal proportions.

Explanations in Linguistic Typology

Once typological correlations are established, they ought to be explained, but
when we turn to explanations the discipline's tendency to diffuseness in-
creases. Individual typological enterprises discussed below have invoked the
following kinds of explanations.
First, the formal generality achieved by a particular correlation might
suffice as an explanation. Thus the tendency of languages to arrange the

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 149

components of all constructions in either dependent-head order or head-

dependent order (discussed below) might be explained in terms of formal
simplicity: One needs only one ordering principle per language rather than a
series of distinct principles (order objects before verbs, order possessors
before nouns, etc).
Second, an explanation might be functional, arguing that a particular
correlation communicates more efficiently than its inverse. For instance,
since fixed word order and morphological case marking are both means of
distinguishing subjects from objects, one might expect that a language with
more case marking would have a freer word order, and vice versa, a
generalization borne out at least as a tendency: Russian, with its nominative/
accusative distinction, permits any permutation of the three constituents in
Kolja Ijubit Tanju (Kolya-NOMINATIVE loves Tanya-ACCUSATIVE)
'Kolya loves Tanya', while English, lacking such morphological means of
distinguishing subjects and objects, permits only the order given and the
pragmatically highly marked alternative Tanya Kolya loves.

THE GREENBERGIAN TRADITION

Linguistic typology should be about issues rather than schools. The field is so
diffuse, however, that it is convenient to organize this discussion in terms of
several recent traditions. For recent North American linguistic typology
outside the generative framework, perhaps the major impetus has been Green-
berg's paper on work order universals (4). Although this paper was primarily
about universals, it revealed that, of the numerous logically possible word
order types, four dominate the world: (a) subject-object-verb, possessor-
noun, adjective-noun, noun-postposition; (b) like a but with noun-adjective;
(c) verb-subject-object, noun-possessor, noun-adjective, preposition-noun;
(d) like c but with subject-verb-object. The implications of this classification
are discussed in the following section. More generally, this seminal paper
reinvigorated studies of language universals and linguistic typology in North
America.

Word Order Typology

Scholars first attempted to generalize further the sometimes restricted, though
empirically well-illustrated correlations noted by Greenberg himself. Venne-
mann (19) reinterpreted Greenberg's various word order types in terms of a
basic dichotomy: dependent-head languages versus head-dependent
languages.4 Dependent-head languages are characterized by the orders object-

4Various terms are used-e.g. adjunct or operator for dependent, operand for head; Venne-
mann's terms are operator and operand. As a rule of thumb, the head of a phrase is the constituent
after which the phrase is named-i.e. the verb is head of the verb phrase, the noun of the noun
phrase, and the adposition of the ad-(pre-/post-)-positional phrase.

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
150 COMRIE

verb, possessor-noun, adjective-noun, noun-postposition; while head-

dependent languages are characterized by the orders verb-object, noun-
possessor, noun-adjective, preposition-noun. Turkish, as a rather consistent
dependent-head language, has the orders okiiz-ii aldi (ox-ACCUSATIVE
bought) '(he) bought the ox', adam-in ev-i (man-GENITIVE house-his) 'the
man's house', biiyiik vehir 'big city', adam ifin (man for) 'for the man'; while
Welsh has gwelodd y bachgen '(he) saw the boy', ty y dyn (house the man)
'the man's house', llyfr bach (book small) 'small book', and gan y dyn 'with
the man'. Vennemann's generalization has two main characteristics. First,
it omits reference to the position of the subject, so that both verb-subject-ob-
ject and subject-verb-object are collapsed as verb-object. Second, the num-
erous albeit minoritarian languages that do not correspond to one of these
two ideal types must be treated as exceptions to the generalization. Exam-
ples include Persian, which is basically head-dependent but has object-verb
word order, and all the many dependent-head languages with noun-adjec-
tive order.
More recent work on word order typology has in general rejected
the extreme version of Vennemann's proposal. The number of exceptions
is far too large for comfort, and it is even doubtful whether any correla-
tion can be established for some parameters, most noticeably the order of
adjective and noun. Moreover, the exclusion of the position of the subject
is questionable. Languages with verb-subject-object word order are typo-
logically rather homogeneous, but those with subject-verb-object order are
remarkably heterogeneous. These criticisms of Vennemann's approach
are summarized by Hawkins (6). Vennemann (20) has retreated from his
earlier position, arguing that dependent-head and head-dependent define
ideal types that languages approach to varying degrees. This is also a retreat
away from correlations and toward pure classification as the typology's
rationale.
Hawkins (6) argues that a number of more restricted correlations among
word order parameters can be established as exceptionless. One of Hawkins's
main methodological points is that a strict distinction must be made between
exceptionless universals and universal tendencies. While such a distinction
may be desirable in theory, it is impossible to make in practice. Indeed
Hawkins's approach has set a cottage industry to work finding counterexam-
ples to his "exceptionless" correlations. My own position is that any correla-
tion that deviates significantly from change is worthy of examination and
explanation. More recently, Hawkins (8) has adopted functional, cognitive
explanations for a wide range of word order correlations. This approach was
adumbrated by Kuno's study of the correlation between verb-last word order
and prenominal relative clauses, and between verb-first word order and post-
nominal relative clauses (11). That subordinate clauses tend to appear either

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 151

at the far left or at the far right of their matrix clause, rather th
suggests that humans find it easier to process clauses one at a time than to
interrupt the processing of one clause in order to process another. As illus-
trated by schemata a and b, below, a verb-last language with prenominal
relative clauses will have at least many instances of strictly left-branching
subordinate clauses (namely, whenever the noun phrase with the relative
clause starts the sentence, as in a), while a verb-last language with postnomin-
al relative clauses would have internal relative clauses in every instance (since
the verb of the main clause must always follow, as in b).

(a) [ [ Relative clause ] Noun ]Noun phrase Verb

(b) [ Noun [ Relative clause ]I Noun phrase Verb

Explanations based upon cognitive processing predict word order preferences

but do not exclude certain word order types. While processing sentence-
internal relative clauses may be more difficult, it is not impossible; indeed,
verb-last languages with postnominal relative clauses exist (e.g. Persian).

Semantic Typology

In a recent monograph, Hawkins (7) has proposed a semantic typology of

languages to account for a number of apparently unrelated typological con-
trasts between English and German. Since these distinctions are also found
between English and Russian, with Russian occupying an even more extreme
position in the typology than German, I use examples here from my own work
on Russian (2, Sect. 3.5). This work builds, incidentally, on previous work,
in particular that of the Prague School.
The basic clause structures of English and Russian differ in a number of
logically independent respects: (a) Russian has a rich case system, in particu-
lar distinguishing nominative case for subjects and accusative case for direct
objects; English has virtually no case system, in particular no nominative-
accusative distinction except for some personal pronouns. (b) Russian has
so-called free word order, in that any of the six logically possible per-
mutations of the three words in Kolja Ijubit Tanju (Kolya-NOMINATIVE
loves Tanya-ACCUSATIVE) 'Kolya loves Tanya' is grammatical and has
roughly the same meaning as the original sentence; English word order, by
contrast, is by and large fixed, so that changing the word order of Kolya loves
Tanya leads either to a sentence with a completely different meaning-e.g.
Tanya loves Kolya-or a nonsentence of English-e.g. *loves Kolya Tanya.
(c) In English, the basic grammatical relations-subject, direct object-
correspond to a much wider range of semantic roles than is the case in
Russian. Thus the English the lightning killed the girl, with a nonagentive
transitive subject, is most naturally translated into Russian as molniej ubilo

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
152 COMRIE

devusku (lightning-INSTRUMENTAL killed-NEUTER girl-ACCUSA-

TIVE), more literally 'it (unspecified) killed the girl with lightning'. Indeed,
in English it is common to find within a clause grammatical relations that have
no semantic role, as in John seems to have left, where John is the subject of
seems but bears a semantic role rather to the subordinate verb have left.
Russian has no analog of this construction (so-called Subject-to-Subject
Raising). (d) In Russian, word order is used primarily to encode topic-
comment structure (functional sentence perspective)-i.e. to encode such
notions as topic (what the sentence is about) and focus (the essential new
information imparted by the sentence). The basic rule is that the topic starts
the sentence and the focus ends it. Thus, in answer to the question 'and what
about Tanya, who loves her?' the appropriate Russian answer would be Tanju
Ijubit Kolja: The question forces the respondent to pick Tanya (corresponding
here to the syntactic direct object) as topic and Kolya (corresponding to the
syntactic subject) as focus, since this is the only new information imparted.
Hawkins argues that all these differences are but facets of a single typological
distinction: Russian (and German) surface syntactic structures preserve
semantic representation more directly than do English surface syntactic struc-
tures. An English surface subject is far more ambiguous semantically than its
Russian counterpart, the richer case morphology of Russian provides a more
direct encoding of underlying semantic distinctions, etc.
Semantic typology is now being extended in investigations of languages
outside Europe. For instance, the rich voice systems of Philippine languages
seem to indicate an even looser fit between semantics and surface syntax than
exists in English. The Tagalog ang noun phrase can play not only the
same semantic roles it plays in English but also such roles as benefactive,
locative, instrumental, and temporal. Scholars are also examining whether
this difference in fit between semantics and surface syntax extends beyond
basic clause structure to other areas of the language. Thus, Hawkins ar-
gues that the distinctions discussed above correlate with the greater seman-
tic specificity required in German. So, too, in such expressions as prolozif
dorogu 'lay/make a road', vif gnezdo 'weave/make a nest', SVif plate 'sew/
make a dress', and pec xleb 'bake/make bread', Russian requires a specific
verb (corresponding to the first English translation in each case), while
English happily allows the general make throughout. However, Russian and
German are not more explicit semantically than English in all areas. For
instance, corresponding to the wide range of English tense-aspect expressions
John read, John has read, John was reading, John has been reading, John
had read, John had been reading, John used to read, as well as rarer
combinations like John used to have been reading, Russian has only the
two-way opposition Dz'on cital (IMPERFECTIVE) and Dz'on procital (PER-
FECTIVE). Finally, Hawkins argues that languages like German and Russian

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 153

also place heavier constraints on extracting items out of subordinate clauses,

so that while English can happily say the man [who(m) I thought [(that) you
knew], where who(m) is the object of knew, literal translations into Russian or
German are impossible (e.g. Russian *celovek, [kotorogo ja dumal, [to ty
znaes]]. Note that such extractions lead again to surface distortion of semantic
relations, since who(m) belongs semantically with knew but appears in surface
syntax in the same clause as thought. However, the crosslinguistic investiga-
tion of correlations between extraction possibilities and basic clause structure
is at a rudimentary stage.

Head-Marking and Dependent-Marking

One recent promising basis for a typology of rather general validity is the
distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking, developed by
Nichols (14). If a construction has dependent-marking, then the relation
between the head of the construction and its dependent(s) is indicated by a
change in form of the dependent(s). For instance, in the English possessive
construction the man's house, it is the form of the dependent the man that
changes to show the relation. By contrast, in the Hungarian head-marking
construction az ember haz-a (the man house-his), it is the head haz 'house'
that changes. As with many typologies, there are mixed cases-e.g. Turkish
adam-in ev-i (man-POSSESSIVE house-his) marks both head and dependent,
while Haruai (Papua New Guinea) nobo ram (man house) marks neither;
moreover, some languages have head-marking in one part of their grammar
but dependent-marking elsewhere. The recognition of head-marking as a
phenomenon worthy of attention is one of the main insights of Nichols's
work, especially since many current theories of syntax, themselves based on
the predominantly dependent-marking major European languages, are ill
equiped to deal directly with head-marking constructions (usually treating
them, if at all, as deformations of putative underlying dependent-marking
constructions).
More important for linguistic typology is Nichols's claim that the head/
dependent-marking distinction correlates with other, logically independent
typological distinctions. Extended and justified, this basic structural distinc-
tion between construction types would be the basis of a typology of unusually
wide range. For instance, Nichols has suggested (in a lecture at the University
of Southern California in 1987) that the distinction between alienable and
inalienable possession correlates highly with head-marking. She explains this
by noting that the explicit marking of inalienable possession typically in-
volves nouns obligatorily marked for the person-number of their possessor, a
clear instance of head-marking. It should be noted that in this example the
motivation for a link between the logically independent typological contrasts

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
154 COMRIE

is quite specific; it does not depend (as arguments too often do in linguistic
typology) on abstract principles of untested validity.

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

A decade ago mainstream generative grammar was largely confined to the

analysis of English, with occasional forays into closely related languages.
Today generative grammar is used to investigate a wider range of languages.
It now also provides, through the notion of parameter, a mechanism for
dealing not only with putatively universal properties of language but also with
typological diversity. I discuss two such parameters here as illustrations.

Pro-Drop Parameter
One of the most widely discussed parameters within Government and Binding
Theory, the main current version of generative grammar, is pro-drop. Pro-
drop is a syntactic parameter; its manifestations are said to be correlated (la,
Sect. 4.3, 4.5). The most obvious characteristic of a pro-drop language, and
the one after which the parameter was named, is that unstressed personal
pronouns can be dropped. In Spanish (a pro-drop language) alongside yo
llegue 'I arrived' one can also say simply llegue, whereas in English *arriv
is not a possible sentence in isolation. As had been noted by many traditional
grammarians, this possibility correlates with the richer verb agreement system
of Spanish; Spanish llegue is unequivocally first person singular, contrasting
with llegaste 'you arrived', llego' 'he arrived', etc. English, by contast, is
almost completely lacking in verb-pronoun agreement, the distinction be-
tween I, you, we, they go and he goes lacking the richness of a pro-drop
language. Generative grammar is more innovative in relating these to two
further phenomena. Pro-drop languages allow free inversion of subject and
verb/predicate, so that in Spanish alongside Juan llego one can also say llego
Juan, whereas English allows only John arrived (not *arrived John). Pro-
drop languages also allow so-called long-distance movement-i.e. extraction
of items out of configurations that would be impossible in non-pro-drop
languages. Contrast Spanish ,quien crees que saldrd? and English *who do
you think that will leave?5
The pro-drop hypothesis stimulated investigation of a wide range of phe-
nomena, but the current consensus among generative grammarians seems to
be that this parameter cannot be confirmed. Crosslinguistic evidence suggests

5The English sentence is grammatical if modified by omitting the conjunction that-i.e. who
do you think will leave? The conjunction is crucial. The pro-drop parameter predicts that if a
language allows omission of the conjunction then, other things being equal, the resulting sentence
will be grammatical even if the language is non-pro-drop. In Spanish, omission of the conjunction
que is impossible, but the sentence is nonetheless grammatical when que is retained.

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 155

that even the simplest correlation, that between omission of unstressed pro-
nouns and rich verb agreement, does not hold. For instance, Brazilian Portu-
guese has a verb agreement system that, depending on which tense-aspect one
examines, is either just as rich as or less rich than that of German: Brazilian
Portuguese distinguishes at most four person-numbers: eu acho 'I find',
voce^lele acha 'you/he find(s)', nos achamos 'we find', voce'sleles acham 'you
(plural)/they find; often only three: eulvoce^lele achava 'I/ you/ he found', nos
achavamos 'we found', voce^sleles achavam 'you (plural)/they found'; with a
further reduction of one in even educated colloquial speech through the
replacement of nos by a gente, which takes third person singular agreement: a
gente achalachava 'we find/found'. German regularly distinguishes four
person-numbers: ich liebe 'I love', du liebst 'you love', erlihr liebt 'he/you
(plural) love(s)', wirlsie lieben 'we/they love', with a five-way distinction for
a wide range of irregular verbs through different vowels in the third person
singular and the second person plural: er gibt 'he gives', ihr gebt 'you (plural)
give'. Yet Brazilian Portuguese allows omission of unstressed subject pro-
nouns-e.g. acho '(I) find'-whereas German does not: *liebe is not a
possible sentence in isolation. Brazilian Portuguese also allows the extraction
discussed above for Spanish-i.e. quem voce^ acha que vem? 'who do you
think (literally: that) will come?'-while GermIan does not:? (*wer glaubst
du, dass kommen wird?).6 Brazilian Portuguese even has some inversion
parallel to that of Spanish-e.g. o homem chegou or chegou o homem 'the
man arrived', though admittedly the possibilities are much more severely
restricted than in Spanish. In German, subject-object inversion is not free,
being conditioned either semantically-e.g. as a marker of questions (kommst
du? 'do you come?'), or syntactically-e.g. if some constituent other than the
subject starts the clause (e.g. gestern kam sein Sohn, literally 'yesterday came
his son'). Thus the precise typological correlations that are valid in this area
remain to be characterized more adequately.

Configurationality
The second parameter of interest to typologists is configurationality-the
extent to which a language's syntactic structure is hierarchical. The im-
mediate constituents of an English sentence like the big dog bit the kangaroo,

6'he apparently inverse case is presented by a number of East Asian languages, including
Chinese and Japanese, which lack verb agreement but where unstressed pronouns can, and
usually are, omitted. In Japanese, for instance, alongside Taroo ga Ziroo ni hon o ageta
(Taroo-NOMINATIVE Jiro-to book ACCUSATIVE gave) 'Taro gave a book to Jiro', one also
has the perfectly good sentence ageta 'he gave it to him', which is just as complete as the English
translation given. It is now generally agreed in generative grammar, however, that these East
Asian examples are a phenomenon distinct from pro-drop, involving instead an 'empty topic'
position that is coindexed with the missing arguments (9).

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
156 COMRIE

for example, are the big dog (a noun phrase) and bit the kangaroo (a verb
phrase). Immediate constituents of the verb phrase are in turn the verb bit and
the noun phrase the kangaroo. Thus this sentence structure is fairly hierar-
chical, in particular with big and dog grouped as one constituent, bit and
kangaroo as another. English is thus a configurational language. In an
extremely nonconfigurational language, hierarchical structure would be ab-
sent. Hale (5), who introduced this parameter, claims extreme nonconfigura-
tionality for the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri (Walbiri). The
Warlpiri translation, or at least one possible translation, of the English
sentence just discussed is tjarntu-ngku wawiri yarlku-rnu wiri-ngki (dog-
ERGATIVE kangeroo bite-PAST big-ERGATIVE); in fact, any permutation
of these four words is a grammatical sentence with essentially the same
meaning. In Warlpiri not only can the major constituents of the clause (e.g.
subject, verb, object) be moved around freely, but even the components of
what in a configurational language would clearly be constituents (e.g. an
attributive adjective and its head noun) can be separated. In the example just
given, tjarntu-ngku 'dog' and wiri-ngki 'big' are separated in this way. The
interpretation of the sentence relies heavily on the morphology: tjarntu-ngku
and wiri-ngki are in the same case (ergative), so despite their separation they
must belong together semantically, and the ergative case shows that they must
refer to the subject/agent of a transitive verb. The question of this parameter's
validity is significant for syntactic theory, since many mainstream syntactic
theories are designed specifically to deal with configurational languages.
More recent work suggests that languages are neither configurational nor
nonconfigurational but exhibit this parameter to various degrees. For in-
stance, while Warlpiri seems nonconfigurational within the clause, boundar-
ies between clauses seem well defined, so that in a sentence like ngatjulu-rlu-
rna yankiri pantu-rnu, kutja-lpa ngapa nga-rnu (I-ERGATIVE-I emu spear-
PAST, COMPLEMENTIZER-AUXILIARY water drink-PAST) 'I speared
the emu while it was drinking water', the sentence as a whole has its two
immediate constituents-the clauses ngatjulu-rlu-rna yankiri pantu-rnu and
kutja-lpa ngapa nga-rnu-a bit of hierarchical syntactic structure. Moreover,
when a head noun and its attributive adjective are adjacent in the order
noun-adjective, instead of both noun and adjective taking a case marker, one
needs only a single case marker for the whole expression, as in another
version of 'the big dog bit the kangaroo': tjarntu wiri-ngki wawiri yarlku-rnu
which suggests that in this version tjarntu wiri 'big dog' does form a single
constituent, whence it receives a single case marker.
In his analysis of Malayalam as a nonconfigurational language, Mohanan
(12a) claims verb phrases are absent. In English, the verb phrase node gives
added hierarchical structure by grouping the verb and direct object together to
the exclusion of the subject. In Malayalam manusyan kutti-ye kantu 'man

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 157

child-ACCUSATIVE saw' the sentence would have three immediate con-

stituents, as opposed to two in English [the man [saw the child]]. Mohanan
does not question the fact that a sequence of attributive adjective and head
noun in Malayalam forms a constituent.
The generative analysis of Japanese has moved within a few years from the
assumption of extreme nonconfigurationality of the major constituents of the
clause (3) to an analysis with exclusively binary constituents (15)-i.e.
extreme configurationality, such that the sentence given in Footnote 6 would
have the structure [Taroo ga [Ziroo-ni [hon-o ageta]]]; contrast the usual
analysis for English: [Taro [gave the-book to-Jiro]].

SOME EUROPEAN APPROACHES

The survey above reflects my own biases by concentrating on North American

work in linguistic typology. Work of great typological importance is also
being carried out elsewhere.

The UNITYP Project

The UNITYP research group at the University of Cologne, led by H. Seiler,
adopts a much more philosophically oriented approach to language universals
and linguistic typology. A general survey of their approach is available (18).
Here I focus on a specifically typological work that has been heavily in-
fluenced by the UNITYP school, namely Lehmann's typology of relative
clauses (12). Previous typologies had given due attention to such types as the
postnominal relative clause, as in English the man [who saw the woman], to
the prenominal relative clause, as in Turkish [Hasan-in Sinan-a verdigi]
patates (Hasan-GENITIVE Sinan-DATIVE given potato) 'the potato that
Hasan gave to Sinan', and even the 'circumnominal' (or 'head-internal')
relative clause, as in Bambara tyF be [n ye so min ye] dyo (man the PRESENT
I PAST house RELATIVE see build) ' the man is building the house that I
saw', in which the head noun so 'house' is inside the relative clause.
Lehmann clearly distinguishes from these types involving embedding (the
relative clause as a constituent of the main clause) a further set of types in
which the relative clause is merely adjoined, without embedding, to the main
clause, as in Tamil etu ceyyattakkato, atu ceyya ventum (what is-fitting-to-be-
done, that do one-must) 'one must do that which it is fitting to do'. The
UNITYP model, which views individual constructions as resulting from
different operations, with individual operations also playing a role in other
constructions, enables Lehmann to provide a powerful typology of relative
clauses in terms of such operations as attribution, subordination, embedding,
and empty position formation; it further allows him to account for similarities
and differences between relative clauses and other constructions that involve

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
158 COMRIE

some but not all of the same operations. Its theoretical background is too
complex to summarize here, but even as an empirical classification of relative
clause types Lehmann's work is an impressive typological achievement.

The Leningrad Structural Typology Group

The Structural Typology Group, founded by A. A. Xolodovic of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, has produced detailed crosslinguistic
typologies of causative constructions and passive constructions. The group's
most recent monograph, on resultative constructions, is available in English
(13). This group uses an extremely broad data base, meticulously analyzed,
and it states clearly the relation between semantics and syntax (meaning and
structure) in the various phenomena studied. They have investigated, for
example, the diathesis of the resultative relative to that of the nonresultative,
where by diathesis is understood the relation between the semantic arguments
of a predicate and its syntactic arguments. In many languages nonresultative
transitive predicates allow only the formation of intransitive resultatives
where the single argument of the resultative corresponds to the object/patient
of the transitive, the so-called objective resultative, as in dialectal Russian pol
pomy-vs'i (floor wash-RESULTATIVE) 'the floor has been washed (and is
clean)'; cf transitive on pomyl pol 'he washed the floor'. With intransitive
nonresultative verbs, there is no corresponding change in diathesis, as in
nonresultative on pomer 'he died' and resultative on pomer-s'i 'he has died
(and is dead)'. This can be explained by observing that the resultative is
necessarily attributed to the entity that has undergone a change of state; this
entity is typically the object/patient rather than the subject/agent of a transitive
verb. With some transitive verbs, however, the (change of) state is more
readily attributed rather to the subject/agent, and here we do not see any
change in diathesis-e.g. on nadel s'apku 'he put on a hat', resultative on
nade-vsi s'apku 'he has put on (and is wearing) a hat'; this is referred to,
perhaps not entirely felicitously, as the possessive resultative. The Typology
of Resultative Constructions shows in great detail and with copious illustra-
tion how different semantic classes of verbs favor different subtypes of
resultative. While not all languages have all kinds of resultatives, where a
given type of resultative is found the semantic range of verbs allowing that
type crosslinguistically is remarkably homogeneous; for instance, the posses-
sive resultative is particularly likely to be used with verbs referring to the
movement of body parts, putting on clothes, eating and drinking, perception,
etc.

CONCLUSION

Linguistic typology is a field not unified in its theoretical orientation.

Nonetheless, a common theme underlies the range of work described here,

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY 159

namely that crosslinguistic diversity can be investigated and analyzed system-

atically. That scholars approaching language from so many different per-
spectives have arrived at this conclusion indicates the field's continuing
vitality.

Literature Cited

1. Campbell, L., Kaufman, T., Smith- relations and clause structure in

Stark, T. 1986. Meso-America as a
linguistic area. Language 62:530-70
la. Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Gov-
ernment and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris
2. Comrie, B. 1981. Language Universals
and Linguistic Typology. Chicago:
Univ. Chicago Press
3. Farmer, A. 1984. Modularity in Syntax:
A Study of Japanese and English. Cam-
bridge, Mass: MIT Press
4. Greenberg, J. H. 1963. Some universals
of grammar with particular reference to
the order of meaningful elements. In
Universals of Language, ed. J. H.
Greenberg, pp. 73-113. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press
5. Hale, K. 1982. Preliminary remarks on
configurationality. N. East. Linguist.
Soc. 12:86-96
6. Hawkins, J. A. 1983. Word Order Uni-
versals. New York: Academic
7. Hawkins, J. A. 1986. A Comparative
Typology of English and German. Aus-
tin: Univ. Texas Press
8. Hawkins, J. A. 1987. Some processing
motivations for linear order universals.
Manuscript, Univ. S. California
9. Huang, C. -T. J. 1982. Logical relations
in Chinese and the theory of grammar.
PhD thesis, MIT
10. Klimov, G. A. 1985. Zur kontensiven
Typologie. In Relational Typology, ed.
F. Plank, pp. 175-90. Berlin: Mouton
11. Kuno, S. 1974. The position of relative
clauses and conjunctions. Linguist. Inq.
5:117-36.
12. Lehmann, C. 1984. Der Relativsatz.
Tulbingen: Gunter Narr
12a. Mohanan, K. P. 1982. Grammatical
Malayalam. In The Mental Representa-
tion of Grammatical Relations, ed. J.
Bresnan, pp. 504-89. Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press
13. Nedjalkov, V. P. 1988. The Typology of
Resultative Constructions. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins (Russian original:
Leningrad: Nauka, 1983.)
14. Nichols, J. 1986. Head-marking and de-
pendent-marking grammar. Language
62:56-119
15. Saito, M. 1985. Some asymmetries in
Japanese and their theoretical im-
plications. PhD thesis, MIT
16. Sandfeld, K. 1930. Linguistique balka-
nique: problemes et resultats. Paris:
Champion
17. Sapir, E. 1921. Language: An Introduc-
tion to the Study of Speech. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World
18. Seiler, H. 1982. Das sprachliche Erfas-
sen von Gegenstanden (Apprehension).
In Apprehension: Das sprachliche
Erfassen von Gegenstanden, Teil I. Be-
reich und Ordnung der Phanomene, ed.
H. Seiler, C. Lehmann, pp. 3-11 (with
glossary of technical terms, pp. 297-
311). Tubingen: Gunter Narr
19. Vennemann, T. 1972. Analogy in gen-
erative grammar, the origin of word
order. In Proceedings of the Eleventh
International Congress of Linguists, ed.
L. Heilmann, 2:79-83. Bologna: Il Mul-
ino
20. Vennemann, T. 1984. Typology, un-
iversals and change of language. In His-
torical Syntax, ed. J. Fisiak, pp. 593-
612. Berlin: Mouton

This content downloaded from

195.155.204.195 on Mon, 05 Apr 2021 13:00:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms