Name : Fitriatus Soleha

Student Number: 160110101021

14. Typology

Linguistic typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according
to their structural and functional features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties
and the structural diversity of the world's languages.
The universal language assessment of human language in general; whereas the typology
study is related to the way in which languages differ from one another. Language typologies not
only focus on language variations, but also on the restriction / classification of variations found in
the languages of the world.
Why?
Because the restrictions / classification in those languages will be meaningful if divided into
various types.
Tipologists divide languages into types based on what is called the basic word order, commonly
known as the S sequence (subject), O (object), V (verb) in the type of declarative sentence.

The languages of the world can be grouped into 3 types / patterns, namely:
a) SOV (Japanese, Tamil, Turkish, etc.)
b) SVO (Fula, Chinese, English, etc.)
c) VSO (Arabic, Tongan, Welsh, etc)

There are actually other types / possibilities of other types: VOS, OVS, and OSV; where
O (object) precedes S (subject). However, these types rarely appear and usually only exist in
relatively isolated areas, so they are not representative for discussion.

Typology, the exploration of the diversity of languages and the limits on that diversity,
reveals new and important aspects of the nature of grammar and meaning. In order to compare the
grammars of diverse languages, typologists have used equivalent functions to investigate variation
in how meaning is expressed across languages. Typologists have also developed descriptions of
grammatical form that can abstract away from the myriad language-specific categories and
constructions, such as presence vs. absence of encoding of concepts, the presence vs. absence of
cross-cutting distinctions, the mapping of meaning components into morphemes, and linguistic
distance.
There are three areas of grammar where a cross-linguistic survey was undertaken and it
was recognized that there are limits to grammatical diversity was the order of words. Second, one
must be able to identify phenomena from one language to the next as comparable. Third, we must
identify a range of grammatical patterns or types used to express the linguistic meaning being
examined, and classify languages according to what type(s) is / are used in them.
The exploration of how grammatical form expresses communicated meaning across
languages has led to the discovery of conceptual spaces which reflect commonalities in the
structure of the human mind. The variation across languages reflects competing means of
expressing form and competing forces in the production and comprehension of utterances. The
grammar of a language at any given moment is a system balancing competing motivations as to
how best to express communicative function in linguistic form. The balance is constantly shifting,
giving rise to language changes, the most important of which are those processes that constantly
renew the grammar of languages by the grammaticalization of new constructions. The grammatical
meanings are those that structure the conceptualization of the experience being expressed, so
grammaticalization represents the shift from a word denoting the content of experience to a
grammatical inflection structuring our experience. Another hypothesis is that “grammatical”
meanings express the more situational or interactional aspects of the experience being expressed,
so grammaticalization shifts words from a more “objective” to a more “subjective” meaning.
Whatever the explanation, it is clear that most grammatical constructions arise from periphrastic
expressions with ordinary words, and there are only a limited number of paths of
grammaticalization for each grammatical category that are used by languages. An understanding
of grammaticalization is a prerequisite for understanding the nature of grammar.