Forward to the past : modernizing linguistic typology by returning to its roots

• Main Author: LaPolla, Randy J.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::Linguistics; History of Linguistics; Wilhelm von Humboldt; Linguistic Typology; Romanticism
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152669
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The comparative study of unrelated languages did not begin with Joseph Greenberg in the 1960’s, but began more than 150 years earlier in Europe with scholars of the Romanticist movement. The most prominent of these scholars was the German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose goal in studying 75 different languages was to understand the construal of the world (Weltansicht) of the speakers of the different languages, what we now think of as the cognitive categories manifested by the languages of the speakers, as each language manifests a unique set of cognitive categories. Until Humboldt’s time, most comparison was just of lexical items, but Humboldt argued for more comprehensive language documentation, including full grammars and extensive natural texts, as he argued that it is only in connected discourse that the cognitive categories can be discovered. So he saw language documentation and typology as intimately connected. After full documentation individual categories could be compared across languages. Following in this tradition later in the 19th century we have Franz Boas, and in the early 20th century, his student Edward Sapir, and Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Due to political and philosophical fads, this approach was neglected for many years after the deaths of Sapir and Whorf, but a Structuralist approach was championed by Joseph Greenberg in the mid 1960’s, reigniting interest in linguistic typology, though one with a focus only on structural patterns.