Typology and Universals

Citation

Croft, W. (2003). Typology and Universals (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a textbook of about 340 pages in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series, with nine chapters, a list of references, a map of the languages cited, and author, language and subject indexes. The publisher describes the second edition as thoroughly rewritten and updated, adding new methods such as the semantic map model and questions of syntactic argumentation, discussion of current debates over deeper explanations for specific classes of universals, and a comparison of the typological and generative approaches. The chapters move from method to the classic universals, then to markedness, hierarchies and prototypes, and end with syntax, language change and the status of typology itself.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The opening chapter sets up typology and its relation to generative grammar, then turns to the practical side of the method: cross-linguistic comparison, the problem of comparability across languages, language sampling and data sources.

Chapter 2: Typological Classification

This chapter asks what is being classified in typological classification and includes a section on morphological typology. It prepares the ground for the universals that classification can reveal.

Chapter 3: Implicational Universals and Competing Motivations

Here the book turns to unrestricted and implicational universals and to competing motivations. It treats deeper explanations for word order and affix order universals and returns to the relation between typology, universals and generative grammar.

Chapter 4: Grammatical Categories: Typological Markedness, Economy and Iconicity

The chapter develops typological markedness and then economy and iconicity as explanations, with discussion of frequency and deeper explanations for them and of typological asymmetries in word order and phonology.

Chapter 5: Grammatical Hierarchies and the Semantic Map Model

The chapter covers the animacy and definiteness hierarchies, the semantic map model, the relation between conceptual spaces, structural coding and behavioural potential, and the hierarchies of grammatical relations.

Chapter 6: Prototypes and the Interaction of Typological Patterns

Typological markedness patterns in grammatical categories are brought together with prototypes. The chapter treats typological prototypes, grammatical relations, parts of speech, and other prototypes and markedness reversals.

Chapter 7: Syntactic Argumentation and Syntactic Structure in Typology

The chapter takes up typology and syntactic argumentation, then iconicity, economy and syntactic structure, and ends with typological conspiracies and communicative motivation.

Chapter 8: Diachronic Typology

The final substantive chapter moves from states to processes. It covers grammaticalization and the question of inferring diachrony from synchrony.

Chapter 9: Typology as an Approach to Language

A short closing chapter on what it means to think like a typologist, on description, explanation and generalization, and on the relation of typology to the Saussurean dichotomies and the evolutionary model.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3

• Language sampling: choosing languages for comparison so that cross-linguistic generalizations can be trusted.
• Implicational universal: a statement that if a language has one property it will also have another, as opposed to an unrestricted universal.
• Competing motivations: explanations in which several pressures pull a pattern in different directions.

Chapters 4–6

• Typological markedness: the asymmetry by which one member of a grammatical contrast is structurally and behaviourally more restricted than the other.
• Economy and iconicity: two motivations used to explain the form of marked and unmarked categories.
• Semantic map model: a way of representing the relations among functions that a grammatical form can cover.
• Typological prototype: the most typical members of a category as identified across languages.

Chapters 7–9

• Syntactic argumentation: the problem of deciding on language-internal grounds what counts as a syntactic structure or relation.
• Grammaticalization: the process by which lexical items and constructions become grammatical forms.
• Diachronic typology: explaining synchronic patterns through the processes of language change.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A method textbook and a theory in one. The contents show that the book spends its first chapters on comparability, sampling and data sources before it turns to explanation, so that a reader sees how a universal is established before seeing how it is explained.
• Systematic coverage of the explanatory toolkit. Implicational universals, competing motivations, markedness, economy, iconicity, hierarchies, the semantic map model and prototypes each have their place in the chapter sequence, giving readers one connected account of the main devices of functional typology.
• Treatment of the generative alternative. The publisher highlights the comparison of typological and generative approaches, and the table of contents revisits generative grammar in Chapter 3 and syntactic argumentation in Chapter 7.
• Diachrony is part of the explanation. A full chapter on diachronic typology, including grammaticalization, shows why Croft treats language change as a source of explanation for synchronic universals.

Limitations

• A single viewpoint. The publisher presents the book as arguing for functional and diachronic explanations; readers who want a neutral catalogue of structural types will find that other books in the course list serve that purpose better.
• Demanding for newcomers. The chapters assume a working knowledge of morphology and syntax, and the length (about 340 pages with a long reference list) leaves little room for background on basic notions.
• Not a fieldwork or grammar-writing guide. The book concerns comparison and explanation, so students learning to describe a language will need a descriptive or fieldwork text alongside it.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the typology and fieldwork list, Croft is the theoretical and methodological core for readers who already know how languages are described. Velupillai's An Introduction to Linguistic Typology is the gentler survey of the domains of typology with data from many languages and is the better first book; Kroeger's Analyzing Grammar and Payne's Describing Morphosyntax teach grammatical analysis and description, which Croft takes for granted.

The fieldwork books (Bowern's Linguistic Fieldwork and Meakins, Green and Turpin's Understanding Linguistic Fieldwork) concern collecting and documenting data rather than explaining patterns across languages. Croft is the book to read after a survey of typology and a grammar-description text, and before research papers on specific universals or on grammaticalization.

How to Use This Book

The book is aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students with a grounding in morphology and syntax, ideally with a first course in typology. It suits students writing on word order, markedness, hierarchies or grammatical relations, and researchers from neighbouring fields who want the functional-typological position stated in one place.

Read Chapters 1–3 first, as they set up the method and the notion of implicational universal that later chapters depend on. Chapters 4–6 form the core of the explanatory account and are best read in order. Chapter 7 is the one to read slowly if the interest is in the relation to generative syntax, and Chapter 8 if the interest is in language change. Chapter 9 is short and works as a summary of the book's stance. Keep the map of languages cited and the language index at hand when checking an example, and work through one cross-linguistic claim yourself, with a small sample, to see the method in action.