From the introduction to William Croft, Typology and universals, Cambridge University Press, 1990:
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The term typology has a number of different uses, both within linguistics and without. The common definition of the term is roughly synonymous with "taxonomy" or "classification," a classification of the phenomenon under study in to types, particularly structural types. This is the definition that is found outside of linguistics, for example in biology, a field that inspired linguistic theory in the nineteenth century. We will not be concerned with this definition except insofar as any scientific inquiry involves the classification of the phenomena under examination. The broadest and most unassuming linguistic definition of "typology" refers to a classification of structural types across languages. In this second definition, a language is taken to belong to a single type, and a typology of languages is a definition of the types and an enumeration or classification of the languages into those types. We will refer to this definition of typology as typological classification. The morphological typology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an example of this use of the term. This definition introduces the basic connotation that "typology" has to contemporary linguists: typology has to do with cross-linguistic comparison of some sort... A more specific definition of "typology" is that it is the study of linguistic patterns that are found cross-linguistically, in particular, patterns that can be discovered solely by cross-linguistic comparison... The primary purpose of this volume is to discuss the kinds of cross-linguistic patterns that have been discovered and the methodological and empirical issues raised by the study of these patterns. |