Introducing English Linguistics

Language typology and language universals
The study of language typology is closely connected to the study of lan-
guage universals. However, as Comrie (1989: 1–12) observes, linguists dif-
fer in how they use typological information to study universals.
Linguists of the generative school of linguistics limit the number of lan-
guages they study, placing greater emphasis on the positing of “abstract
structures” (Comrie 1989: 2) to explain language universals. For instance,
languages can be classified according to whether they permit pro-drop:
the omission of pronouns in subject position. While English mandates
38
INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

---

that the subject pronoun occur in a sentence like I called my mother, in
Spanish the pronoun can be omitted: Llamé a mi madre (literally ‘called my
mother’). The abstract categories that generativists posit are an outgrowth
of Chomsky’s theory of principles and parameters: the belief that when all
children are born, their linguistic competence contains both a set of uni-
versal principles that do not vary from language to language and param-
eters specifying a permissible range of variation within which languages
may vary. Therefore, a child born in an environment in which he or she is
exposed to Spanish will set the pro-drop parameter to “on.” In contrast, a
child exposed to English will set the parameter to “off.” Linguists within
the generative school study language typology as a means of revealing uni-
versal properties of human language in line with the generative notions
of language universals and language acquisition.
Other typologists, most notably Greenberg (2000), are much more inter-
ested in surveying a wide range of languages, and then from these surveys
postulating various linguistic universals. For instance, Tomlin’s (1986)
work on word order is based on an investigation of 402 different lan-
guages. Instead of postulating abstract principles specifying permissible
vs. impermissible word orders, Tomlin’s conclusion that SOV and SVO are
the dominant word orders is based on statistical evidence: the fact that 87
percent of the languages he investigated had these orders. A generativist
would never base his/her claims on statistics but on parameters, such as
pro-drop, that make reference to universal grammar.
In addition to describing how languages have changed, many linguists have
been interested in the factors that cause languages to change. Why, for
instance, did German maintain a system of inflections for case, number,
and gender over time, but English, a language in the same language family
(Germanic), did not? Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain facts
such as this, and this section surveys some of them, beginning with a dis-
cussion of whether language change is an evolutionary process and con-
cluding with a description of the most extreme form of language change –
language death: the actual extinction of a living language.