What do all languages have in common, and what gives each language its individuality? These typological questions are fundamental to linguistic theory. This collection comprises original contributions from leading scholars of the major schools of contemporary typological research, from the Prague School to the Generative Grammar tradition. Each contributor presents the theoretical foundations and practical achievements of his or her approach to language typology; the whole provides a unique overview of a field characterized by its diversity.

• 1: Masayoshi Shibatani and Theodora Bynon: Approaches to Language Typology: A Conspectus


• 2: Paolo Ramat: Typological Comparison: Towards a Historical Perspective


• 3: Petr Sgall: Prague School Typology


• 4: William Croft: Modern Syntactic Typology


• 5: Joseph H. Greenberg: The Diachronic Typological Approach to Language


• 6: Gilbert Lazard: Typological Research on Actancy: The Paris RIVALC Group


• 7: Vladimir P. Nedjalkov and Viktor P. Litvinov: The St Petersburg/Leningrad Typology Group


• 8: Hansjakob Seiler: Cognitive-Conceptual Structure and Linguistic Encoding: Language Universals and Typology in the UNITYP Framework


• 9: Naoki Fukui: The Principles-and-Parameters Approach: A Comparative Syntax of Engish and Japanese

Masayoshi Shibatani is Professor of Linguistics at Kobe University, and co-editor of the journal Pragmatics. He is author of The Languages of Japan (1990) and editor of several collections of typological interest including Grammatical Constructions (1996), Passive and Voice (1988), and The Grammar of Causative Constructions (1976).
Theodora Bynon is Professor of Historical Linguistics (now part-time) at the University of London. She is the author of Historical Linguistics (1977) and of numerous papers on topics in historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, and typology.