Language Typology from the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Abstract

Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a theory which is very strong and so flexible that it addresses various research areas such as ‘language development in children’, ‘educational linguistics’, ‘computational linguistics’, and ‘clinical linguistics’. One of the other research applications of the mentioned theory is ‘language typology’. The research area of language typology within SFG is called ‘systemic functional typology’ or ‘systemic typology’ in short. In this paper, along with briefly introducing the book “Language Typology: A Functional Perspective”, we have tried to present a profile of ‘systemic typology’. To do so, at first, we have briefly reviewed the dominant approaches to language typology, i.e., holistic typology and partial typology, and the studies conducted in the framework of those approaches. Then parallel with the chapters of the book “Language Typology: A functional perspective”, we have mentioned the key points in systemic typology. Since the main objective of systemic typology is ‘to achieve empirical generalizations’, a large part of the introduction of systemic typology in this paper has been devoted to typological generalizations. In the end, an analysis of ‘word order typology’ has been touched upon, too.

Keywords

• language typology
• systemic functional linguistics
• systemic typology
• matthiessen’s typological generalizations