Linguistic Typology and Formal Grammar

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the relationship between linguistic typology and formal grammar—a relationship that has existed for several decades now and is unlikely to disappear any time soon. As the reader will see, the two orientations differ in a number of respects, but they share the custody of language, and that motivates the need for communication between the two. More importantly still, the field of linguistics as a whole is beginning to study language as a dynamic system operating simultaneously on multiple levels of representation, rather than as a disparate assemblage of discrete levels of analysis (lexicon, phonology, syntax), or as a collection of particular linguistic phenomena. This common challenge to both theory construction and typology is motivated by the increasing integration of linguistics with more technically sophisticated disciplines that also investigate human cognition and consciousness.