For a Discourse-Sensitive Typology: Theoretical and methodological aspects
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2785-0943/21716Keywords:
typology, discourse, methods, usage-basedAbstract
The aims of this paper are twofold. First, I aim to discuss some theoretical and practical issues concerning the methods employed by linguists when doing typological research. More specifically, I will present the kinds of data typologists usually base their work on, also discussing some related issues that deal with the nature of the data themselves and the possible misinterpretations that they may lead to. Then, I will discuss how typology tends to focus its attention over a limited array of phenomena (i.e., morphosyntactic ones), leaving aside phenomena pertaining to other levels of analysis (e.g., discourse). I thus will exemplify how integrating discourse phenomena might result in more comprehensive analyses and, consequently, in better-suited typological generalizations. Second, I will propose a multi-level method (which I call discourse-sensitive typology) based on the converging evidence perspective, discussing how it might help us to overcome the abovementioned issues and ultimately make typology truly usage-based.
Downloads
References
Barotto, Alessandra & Simone Mattiola. 2023a. Discourse phenomena in typological perspective: An overview. In Alessandra Barotto & Simone Mattiola (eds.), Discourse phenomena in typological perspective, 1-9. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Barotto, Alessandra & Simone Mattiola (eds.). 2023b. Discourse phenomena in typological perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Becker, Laura & Matías Guzmán Naranjo. 2025. Replication & methodological robustness in typology. Linguistic Typology 29(3). 463–505.
Bickel, Balthasar. 2010. Capturing particulars and universals in clause linkage: A multivariate analysis. In Isabelle Bril (ed.), Clause-hierarchy and clause-linking: The syntax and pragmatics interface, 51–101. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Bickel, Balthasar. 2011. Multivariate typology and field linguistics: A case study on detransitivization in Kiranti (Sino-Tibetan). In Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, David Nathan & Lutz Marten (eds.), Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 3, 3–13. London: SOAS.
Bickel, Balthasar. 2015. Distributional Typology: Statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 901-923. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bybee, Joan L. 2006. From Usage to Grammar: The Mind’s Response to Repetition. Language 82(4). 711-733.
Bybee, Joan L. & Clay Beckner. 2010. Usage-based theory. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 827–855. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caesar-Fox, Desrey Clementine. 2003. Zauro'nödok Agawayo Yau: variants of Akawaio spoken at Waramadong. Doctoral dissertation, Rice University, Houston.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, 25-55. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Chafe, Wallace. 1980. The deployment of consciousness in the production of a narrative. In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories, 9-50. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Chafe, Wallace. 1987. Cognitive constraints on information flow. In Russell Tomlin (ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse, 21-51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Corbett, Greville. No date. Agreement: Gender and Number. (Typological tools for field linguistics, MPI-EVA, Leipzig, available online at: https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaire/gender-and-number_description.php)
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2009. Grammatical categories and relations: Universality vs. language-specificity and construction-specificity. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1). 441–479.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Croft, William. 2003. Typology and Universals, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William & Alan D. Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cysouw, Michael & Bernhard Wälchli. 2007. Parallel texts: using translational equivalents in linguistic typology. STUF – Language Typology and Universals 60(2). 95-99.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dahl, Östen. 2015. How WEIRD are WALS languages? Presentation at the conference Diversity Linguistics: Retrospect and Prospect, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, 1 May 2015.
Diessel, Holger. 2019. The Grammar Network. How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dingemanse, Mark. 2012. Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(10). 654–672.
Dryer, Matthew S. 1989. Large linguistic areas and language sampling. Studies in Language 13(2). 257-292.
Dryer, Matthew S. 1997. Are grammatical relations universal? In Joan Bybee, John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Essays on Language Function and Language Type, 115–143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dryer, Matthew S. & Martin Haspelmath (eds). 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available online at: http://wals.info (Accessed 2025.03.26).
Du Bois, John W. 1985. Competing motivations. In John Haiman (ed.), Iconicity in syntax, 343–365. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Du Bois, John W. 2003. Discourse and grammar. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure, Vol. 2, 47–87. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gildea, Spike. 1998. On reconstructing grammar: Comparative Cariban morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Givón, Talmy. 1979a. From discourse to syntax: Grammar as a processing strategy. In T. Givón (ed.), Discourse and syntax, 81–113. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Givón, Talmy. 1979b. On understanding grammar. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Givón, Talmy (ed.). 1983. Topic continuity in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Givón, Talmy. 1984. Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Guzmán Naranjo, Matías & Laura Becker. 2022. Statistical bias control in typology. Linguistic Typology 26(3). 605-670.
Haig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan (eds.). 2023. Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus of annotated spoken texts. Version 2311. Bamberg: University of Bamberg. Available online at: multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de (Accessed 2025.03.26)
Hammarström, Harald, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath, Sebastian Bank. 2025. Glottolog 5.2. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available online at: http://glottolog.org (Accessed 2025.12.09)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Pre-established categories don’t exist: Consequences for language description and typology. Linguistic Typology 11(1). 119–132.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies. Language 86(3). 663–687.
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine & Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? The Behavioral and brain sciences 33(2-3). 61-83.
Hopper, Paul J. 1987. Emergent grammar. In Jon Aske, Natasha Beery, Laura Michaelis & Hana Filip (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Grammar and Cognition, 139–157. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Hopper, Paul J. 1988. Emergent grammar and the a priori grammar postulate. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Linguistics in Context, 117–134. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Lahaussois, Aimée & Yvonne Treis. 2019. Ideophones and interjections. Workshop at SLE 2019 Conference, University of Leipzig.
Lahaussois, Aimée & Julie Marsault and Yvonne Treis (eds.). 2024. Ideophones: honing in on a descriptive and typological concept. Special Issue of Linguisdtic typology at the crossroads 4(1). 1-444.
Majid, Asifa & Stephen C. Levinson. 2010. WEIRD languages have misled us, too. The Behavioral and brain sciences 33(2-3). 103.
Masini, Francesca & Simone Mattiola. 2019. Come fare tipologia con categorie non tradizionali? In Chiara Gianollo & Caterina Mauri (eds.), CLUB Working papers in linguistics 3, 282-294. Bologna: AMS Acta – Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna.
Mattiola, Simone. 2019. Typology of pluractional constructions in the languages of the world. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mattiola, Simone & Spike Gildea. 2023. The pluractional marker -pödï of Akawaio (Cariban) and beyond. International Journal of American Linguistics 89(4). 457-491.
Mauri, Caterina & Francesca Masini 2022. Diversity, discourse, diachrony: A converging evidence methodology for grammar emergence. In Miriam Voghera (ed.), From Speaking to Grammar, 101-150. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Mauri, Caterina & Andrea Sansò. 2017. Un approccio tipologico ai general extenders. In Marina Chini & Pierluigi Cuzzolin (eds.), Tipologia, Acquisizione, Grammaticalizzazione. Typology, Acquisition, Grammaticalization Studies, 63-72. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Mettouchi, Amina, Dominique Caubet, Martine Vanhove, Mauro Tosco, Bernard Comrie, Shlomo Izre’el. 2010. CORPAFROAS, A Corpus for Spoken Afroasiatic Languages: Morphosyntactic and Prosodic analysis. In Frederick Mario Fales & Giulia Francesca Grassi (eds.), CAMSEMUD 2007, Proceedings of the 13th Italian Meeting of Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, 177-180. SARGON: Padova.
Mettouchi, Amina, Martine Vanhove & Dominique Caubet (eds). 2015. Corpus-based Studies of Lesser-described Languages: The CorpAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.
Miestamo, Matti. 2005. Standard negation: The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Miestamo, Matti, Dik Bakker & Antti Arppe. 2016. Sampling for variety. Linguistic Typology 20(2). 233–296.
Mithun, Marianne (ed.). 1996. Prosody, grammar, and discourse in Central Alaskan Yup’ik. Santa Barbara, CA: Linguistics Department, University of California Santa Barbara.
Mithun, Marianne. 2015. Discourse and grammar. In Heidi Hamilton, Deborah Schiffrin & Deborah Tannen (eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed., 9-41. Oxford: Blackwell.
Overstreet, Maryann. 1999. Whales, candlelight, and stuff like that: General extenders in English discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pakendorf, Brigitte & Françoise Rose (eds.). 2025. Fillers: Hesitatives and placeholders. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Ponsonnet, Maïa, Aimée Lahaussois & Yvonne Treis. 2023. Typologizing Interjections. Workshop organized at Dynamique Du Langage, Lyon, 21 november 2023.
Rijkhoff, Jan, Dik Bakker, Kees Hengeveld & Peter Kahrel. 1993. A method of language sampling. Studies in Language17(1). 169–203.
Rijkhoff, Jan & Dik Bakker. 1998. Language sampling. Linguistic Typology 2(3). 263–314.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten, Natalia Levshina, Susanne Maria Michaelis & Seržant Ilja (eds.). 2018. Explanation in typology: Diachronic sources, functional motivations and the nature of the evidence. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Seifart, Frank, Ludger Paschen & Matthew Stave (eds.). 2024. Language Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo) 2.0. Lyon: Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (UMR5596, CNRS & Université Lyon 2).
Thompson, Sandra A. 1988. A discourse approach to the cross-linguistic category ‘adjective’. In John Hawkins (ed.), Explanations for language universals, 167-185. London: Basil Blackwell.
Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. Introduction to linguistic typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Simone Mattiola
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
