Introduction

Abstract This book is an essay in linguistic typology. As such, it can be placed within the modem tradition of comparative linguistics, which has constantly increased in importance over the last three decades. Taking the pioneering research on word order by Greenberg (1963, 1966) as a starting-point, a steady flow of typological publications has pursued a wide variety of topics from all areas of syntax and morphology. 1 The research results achieved in these publications do not add up to a monolithical typological theory, and are not intended to do so; typological linguistics is not a ‘school’ in the narrow sense of the term. However, all authors working within the framework share at least a number of background assumptions and convictions. Typological linguists take as a point of departure the undeniable fact that languages vary greatly in their structural properties, but they reject the old structuralist dictum that this variation is random, and therefore unpredictable. Thus, an axiom of all typological linguistic inquiry is that cross-linguistic variation is subject to Universal Restrictions. Whatever the selected topic of a typological investigation may be, the aim is always to chart the limitations on the Structural (or Formal) Encoding of a linguistically relevant property in the languages of the world. Typological linguists feel that the results of such enterprises can bring to light hitherto unknown aspects of the nature of human language. Since these typological results could not, in the typical case, have been arrived at by an in-depth analysis of single languages, typological linguistics forms a welcome supplement to other approaches in theoretical linguistics. In some cases, typological generalizations may even be used as an evaluation measure for different competing analyses in linguistic theory formation.