William Croft
Typology and linguistic theory in the past decade: A personal view
1997 was a good year for typology. It marked the inauguration of Linguistic Typology, the occasion of this decennial retrospective. 1997 also witnessed the publication of the first volume of the EUROTYP series by Mouton de Gruyter (Siewierska (ed.) 1997). These volumes represent the culmination of the European Typology Project, which in addition to producing the research contained in the EUROTYP volumes, brought European typologists together on a regular basis, and created the sense of community that, among other things, led to the establishment of the Association for Linguistic Typology. 1997 also witnessed the publication of the first two volumes of the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory monograph series. Haspelmath's Indefinite Pronouns (Haspelmath 1997), the first volume, represents one of the best classical typological studies and brought wider attention to the semantic map model, of which more below. Stassen's Intransitive Predication (Stassen 1997) is awesome in scope and accomplishment, representing the largest crosslinguistic survey outside of phonology and word order up to that time, and providing many profound insights into the syntax and semantics of predication. Finally, 1997 witnessed the founding of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, with a Department of Linguistics directed by Bernard Comrie and devoted to typological research, language documentation, and related activities. This institute has provided resources and a focus for important new research in typology, such as The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. (eds.) 2005), as well as a new locus for bringing together typologists, field linguists, and native speaker consultants.
Linguistic Typology, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 1430-0532
Volume: 11, 07/2007
Pages: 79 - 91
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