Wolfgang Raible

Language typology and language universals: An international handbook.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of our insights into the diversity and unity found across the 6000 languages of this planet. The 125 articles include inter alia chapters to the patterns and limits of variation manifested by various analoguos structures, constructions and linguistic devices across languages (for example, word order, tense and aspect, inflection, colour terms and syllable structure). Other chapters cover the history, methodology and the theory of typology, as well as the relationship between language typology and other disciplines. The majority of the the articles are written in English, some in French or German.

Principles of areal typology

Principles of areal typology 1. Introduction 2. Critique of the notion of Sprachbund 3. Migration and language shift 4. Convenient fictions of areal linguistics and areal typology 5. Areal typology and the science of geography 6. Areal linguistics and sampling 6.1. Sampling of languages 6.2. Sampling of features 7. Sample areas 8. The areal distribution of some major typological features 8.1. Basic word order 8.2. Ergativity 8.3. Tense and aspect 9. Are statistical universals historical accidents? 10. The areal dimension of grammaticalization 1. References

Von der Allgegenwart des Gegensinns (und einiger anderer Relationen)

Aristoteles berichtet im A der Metaphysik (986a22ff.): «Andere aus der Schule der Pythagoreer sagen, es gebe zehn Prinzipien, die sie in Form einer Reihe von geordneten Paaren (συστοιχία) nennen: begrenzt unbegrenzt ungerade gerade (von Zahlen ν) das Eine das Viele rechts linke m nnlich weiblich ruhend bewegt gerade (έν&ύ) krumm hell dunkel gut schlecht gleichseitig (quadratisch) ungleichseitig.»

Alterität und Identität

SummaryDifferent aspects and levels of otherness and sameness (identity) should be distinguished. (1) The experience of otherness is a prerequisite to the formation of human consciousness. Autistic children who, due to a cerebral defect, are not able to see themselves and others from the outside, will develop neither a full mastery of language (whose raison d’être is communication with others) nor social competence. Thus they will never be able to understand or to master pretense and to distinguish social roles, irony, second thoughts, states of mind. (2) The acquisition of social competence through an increasing familiarity with otherness is a slow process in ontogenesis. It is based on experience and memory, starting from shared attention and the child’s realizing that objects — in spite of their being moved in space and time — remain identical, their essence remaining the same (Aristotle defines essence as »continuing to be what has been«, to ti en̄ einai), and it should lead to a thorough understanding of others and their social roles. Nevertheless the mastery of different social roles remains one of the most demanding human tasks. This is why related problems are an important topic in literature. (3) On a conceptual level, otherness and sameness are dialectical concepts presupposing one another. To this corresponds the fact that, contrary to mathematics, in real life ›being other‹ or ›being different‹ implies at the same time ›having much in common‹ (if only the fact that both the ego and the other share the property of being human). (4) Extending the concepts of otherness and sameness to socially — or even culturally — defined groups, we can make use of the concept of ›cultural memory‹. It shows us in what respects groups of people can be felt and seen — more often than not even constructed — as different. Given the dialectical relationship between otherness and sameness, instead of focussing on what is different, we could as well highlight what we have in common with others. Truly understanding the otherness of other cultures would presuppose that we take a stance beyond both our own and the other group, i.e. that we become conscious of culture in much the same way that we became conscious of ourselves and our immediate social partners when we were young.

Literacy and Orality

Orality and literacy are dialectical concepts, the meaning of one term depending on the assessment of the other each has in addition two aspects: a medial and a conceptual one. While mediality is trivial, the conceptual aspect is best conceived of as a continuum, thus blurring any clearcut distinction between orality and scripturality. The scale corresponds to a series of ever-more complex and demanding textual genres. The existence of script—whether alphabetic, syllabic, or ideographic—does not change or achieve anything by itself. In order to unfold its immense creative and changing potential, script has to meet the appropriate cultural—e.g., institutional—conditions. The transformations it may result in are slow—as are all processes impinging on mentality. One process is the enrichment of alphabetic script by an increasing number of ideographic features and a layout benefiting from the two dimensions of the written page. In mathematics, this resulted in a revolution in the seventeenth century. Most recently, informatics, as a new branch of mathematics, leaves deep imprints in everyday life. At the same time, alphabetic script was and is a most powerful metaphor in Western thinking, leaving its traces, e.g., in molecular biology. The increase in literacy characteristic of our modern societies may prompt nostalgic attitudes hailing former states of presumably authentic orality. Such tentatives are bound to fail: once a society has become literate, it cannot but recreate orality with the means of literacy—like the gardens we lay out as surrogates for a lost Nature.