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2. Branches of Comparative Typology as to the levels of language hierarchy

Comparative Typology operates at all levels of language hierarchy without exception. In other words, it can compare the units of phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical levels.

In comparison with other levels the given level is more isolated and at the same time, its sections are more developed from the typological point of view. Inside the phonological level, actually phonologic and phonetic sublevels are identified.

Phonetic and phonological typology deals with thecomparison of units of the phonologic lev­el of language. It engages in theallocation of phonological differential signs, defining their universality, study of thephonological structure of languages, classification of lan­guages on the basis of their phonological features (e.g. tonic and atonic languages), defining thephonemic structure of world languages and many others. For a long time,the Prague linguistic school was the center of Phonological typology.

A certain con­tribution to thedevelopment of Phonological typology was made by N.S.Trubetskoywho is considered the founder of Typology of Phonological systems. R.Yakobson, G.Fant, M.Halle also worked in this area. Later other sides of Phonological typol­ogy were developed by such scientists as Ch. Hockett, K.Vegelin, T.Milevsky, P.Menzerat, V.Skalichka, A.Martine, M.I.Lekomtseva, T.J.EUzarenkova, Abduazizov A.A., G.P.Melnikov,and others.

Major achievements of Phonological typology relate to the allocated cases pho­nologic universals, N.S.Trubetskoy's differential signs, I.Kramskoy, P.Kovaleva's quantitative criteria, supra-segmental typological classification on tone and accent by A.Martine's, numerous researches on acomparison of phonological systems of vari­ous languages.

The circle of research in Morphological typology is very wide. It compares the units of a morphological level. Depending on the character of research the morpho­logical typology can classify into two types:

• 
  Morphological typology engaged in the morphological classification
  of languages;
  
• 
  Morphological typology engaged in particular questions of grammar, i.e. parts of speech and their grammatical categories.
  The first one is a continuation of traditional typological classification engaged in defining language types according to different principles and criteria.
  

The second type of Morphological typology deals with private/individual subjects of comparison: grammatical categories in various languages, defining ways of their expression, morphological markers, synonymous relations of affixational morphemes and syntactic words (prepositions and postpositions), comparison of primary gram­matical categories/parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, numerals and others), comparison of grammatical categories of certain lexical and grammatical categories of words (case, number, definiteness, transitivity - intransitivity, time, aspect, causation, mood, modality, etc.). Morphemes may serve major units of measurement in Morphological typology.

Morphological typology compares the specified phenomena in the systems of both related and non-related languages. The comparison might include revealing mor­phological universals as well as a binary comparison of two languages. Morphological typology has accumulated a serious bulk of data both for Comparative typology and on separate concrete languages. Major scholars who dealt with the issues of Morphological typology are R. Yakobson, L. E Jеlmsiev, L.N. Zasorina, B.A. Uspenskiy, M.M. Gukhman, P.L Garvina and many others.

Syntactic typology engages in acomparison of syntactic level units. The basic units for comparison are word-combination and the sentence. Depending on the character of research Syntactic typology may fall into several sections: comparison of units of a word-combination, the level of the sentence, as well as comparison of units of various levels with regards to their syntactic functioning. Syntactic typology usually compares languages on the basis of atransformationalsyntax.

Still, there is no comprehensive list of topics related to the subject matter of Syn­tactic typology. Some of them are: definition of the subject-matter and volume of Syntactic typology, elaborationof basic criteria and a meta language, border lines between syntactic typology and other branches of Comparative Typology, defining syn­tactic universals, study of syntax of world languages (genetically or structurally re­lated languages), definition of types of syntactic connection (attributive, predicative, etc.), definition of sentence types in languages, basic syntactic categories, classifica­tion of types of languages on the basis of their syntactic structure and many others.

I.I. Meshchaninov, J.V. Rojdestvenskiy C.E. Bazell, T. Milevsky, V.S. Hrakovskiy, contributed a lot to theelaboration of different aspects of Syntactic typology.