Sinologie et typologie. Deux articles de linguistique générale de Georg von der Gabelentz

Abstract

This article includes a translation and a short presentation of two major papers by Georg von der Gabelentz. The first one (1881) is a revised version of the inaugural lecture he presented on the occasion of his appointment to the chair of Chinese, Japanese and Manchu languages, University of Leipzig. The paper shows how Gabelentz delimits his own scientific field in relation to the Indo-European comparative grammar, which was considered as the scientific reference among linguists. The second paper was published in 1894 shortly after the author’s death and introduces typology in linguistics. By using models that probably originate from natural science, the author outlines a program for a statistical processing of typology, based on conjunctions of characters, which foreshadows the implicational universals of modern typology.

Keywords

• East-Asia comparative grammar
• Gabelentz (Georg von der)
• implicational universals
• organicism
• statistics
• typology