Typology in the 21st century: Major current developments

Abstract

1. Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g., a language with a gender distinction exclusively in the 1st person singular.