Lecture (LEC)

• Above class meets with LING-L485.

This course investigates the unity and diversity of the world¿s languages, providing an introduction to linguistic typology and language universals. The languages of the world do not vary randomly - rather, many aspects of linguistic structure are universal to all languages. Furthermore, in most structural domains where there is cross-linguistic variation, the variation itself follows certain patterns. In this course, we will learn about some of the patterns of variation in specific domains. The first part of the course is an introduction to the field of linguistic typology and its place in the overall study of linguistics. This will include overviews of: the history of typology; methodological concerns; and the genetic and areal distribution of the languages of the world. We will discuss grammatical roles and relations, and explore the concept of language universals. We will then learn about phonetic universals, word order typology, and Greenbergian word order correlations before moving into an in-depth examination of the properties of the major word order types. We will explore case/agreement-marking systems, and will see a series of typological sketches of particular constructions and linguistic phenomena such as wh-questions, noun classification, relative clauses, and causatives.