Documentation, Linguistic Typology, and Formal Grammar

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between language documentation and linguistic theory, focusing on linguistic typology and formal grammar, with particular attention to the understanding of linguistic diversity. It reviews the goals of documentation and of the theories under consideration, and outlines the types of data considered in documentation as well as preferred data types in the two theoretical perspectives. It concludes that, while the questions and preferred types of data are different in linguistic typology and formal grammar, nevertheless language documentation has made strong contributions to each of them, and each of them has made strong contributions to language documentation.