Syllabus
1. Basic facts and linguistic resources on the world's languages
2. Classification of languages: genetic classification of languages (language families and their subclassification), areal typology, linguistic typology
3. Phonemes and phonemic inventories
4. Syllable structure across languages, prosodic features
5. Linguistic signs. Expression of grammatical meanings in languages, morphological types (agglutinating, fusional, isolating, polysynthetic)
6. Typology of grammatical categories: case, number, evidentiality, etc. across languages
7. Word formation across languages: approaches to cross-linguistic study of word-formation
8. Typology of syntactic features: comparing word order across languages
9. Language universals - are there any?
10. Types of writing systems, their principles and dynamics
Annotation
The course introduces students to linguistic analysis of multiple languages. Different approaches to classification of the world’s languages are summarized first (genealogical classification, areal typology, language typology).
Students get familiar with existing resources containing information on many languages. The course then focuses on language typology of phonological, morphological, and syntactic features. Recent approaches to typology of word formation are presented too.