Typology and Universals

Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics

by William Croft

The second edition of this essential textbook has been thoroughly rewritten and updated to reflect advances in typology and universals over the past decade. It reviews new methodologies such as the semantic map model and questions of syntactic argumentation; discussion of current debates over explanations for specific classes of universals; and comparison of the typological and generative approaches to language.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Milo Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice and in-depth introduction into Linguistic typology. The book makes clear the goals of modern typology and how it's methods differ from mainstream generative syntax. The book has a wide variety of data from a huge set of languages, giving good insight into how much variety there is in language. Despite this, I found the book hard to follow at times, particularly when discussing the conceptual map hypothesis and how it accounts for cross-Linguistic variation. I think having less examples one after the other at this section may have helped with clarity. All in all an interesting and detailed book.

[Ka Yau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although a technical book on typology, this book reads like a gripping novel. The subject matter is arranged not by construction but by fundamental concepts in typology such as implicational universals, markedness and diachrony. Starting from Greenbergian foundations, the book takes the reader on a journal through modern functional-typological research, and at the end explores the similarities and differences between the generative and functional-typological approaches, the former of which is often missed. Like most linguistics books, of course, the quality and accuracy of a few parts of the book have been cast into doubt by academic book reviewers (and it is always prudent to seek their views after having read the book in its entirety). However, these errors do not undermine the book's overall quality, and I strongly recommend this for anyone with a basic knowledge of linguistics.