International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

22 June - 3 July 2009

Language documentation and typology

Linguistic typology concerns the cross-linguistic comparison of languages independent of their historical and geographical connections. Typologists are interested in the linguistic universals that underlie language, but also linguistic diversity and the ways in which languages may differ from one another. Consequently, typology and language documentation and description have a symbiotic relationship: typologists rely on the quality of grammatical descriptions when assessing which data from a language is relevant to the concepts or constructions under their investigation. Similarly, language documenters look to typology to inform them of categorical variation evident across languages with a view to guide them in the type of terminology that they should use as part of their annotation and grammatical description. In this lecture we will look at 'comparative concepts' in attempting to understand what the term 'category' means to the typologist and language documenter and will address the question of how typology can inform better annotation and metadata practices in corpora-building.