508044 - LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY

courses

ID:

508044

Duration (hours):

36

CFU:

SSD:

GLOTTOLOGIA E LINGUISTICA

Year:

2025

Date/time interval

Primo Semestre (22/09/2025 - 19/12/2025)

Course Objectives

Students are expected to have acquired a good knowledge of language typology, that is, its theoretical and methodological foundations.

Course Prerequisites

Students are expected to be able to follow lectures in English and use technical literature in this language. Knowledge of the fundamentals of general linguistics is required.

Teaching Methods

Lectures

Assessment Methods

Oral exam, paper.
a) Class notes and reading list made available during classes
b) Paper (max. 3000 words plus the references)
c) The students will be requested to give a short presentation of one paper (the list will be made available at the beginning of the course).

Grading:
Presentation: up to 5
Paper: up to 10
Oral: up to 15
Active participation to classes: 1 / honors

Texts

Classroom materials will be presented providing a detailed description of all course topics and relevant references (these materials will also be made available on the web).
Required textbook: Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. Introduction to linguistic typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Suggested textbook: Croft, William. 2003. Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Language typology is the study of linguistic phenomena in cross-linguistic perspective to account for the similarities and dissimilarities that languages of the world display what concerns grammatical structures and form-meaning pairings. Thus, typologists aim to understand why languages differ and are similar providing possible functional/cognitive explanations. The course will provide students with the notions and techniques on which typology is founded and also provide the typological descriptions of some linguistic phenomena to catch and understand linguistic variety and diversity in the world’s languages.
The course will be divided into three different parts.
The first part will be devoted to a general introduction to language typology. First, we will present and discuss what typology is, how the term typology can be interpreted, and some theoretical problems typology has to face since its (recent) founding (e.g., comparability of linguistic structures). The second part will be devoted to the description and discussion of the theoretical foundations of typology. We will introduce the main theoretical notions concerning the comparability of linguistic structures and how to define phenomena in cross-linguistic perspective (descriptive categories vs. comparative concepts). We will then focus on the theoretical tools and outcomes of typological research (universals, implicational hierarchies, semantic maps, typological explanations, etc.). Finally, we will discuss two new approaches to the cross-linguistic study of linguistic phenomena, namely, the source-oriented approach to explain typological universals and discourse-sensitive typology.
The third part will be devoted to students’ presentations. Students will be required to study and present in class a specific typological paper on a specific topic or a linguistic phenomenon from a list of papers that will be made available at the beginning of the course. From this, they will also be asked to write a short essay (about 3000 words) based on the paper they discussed in class and that will be considered as part of the exam (see the Assessment methods below).