TY - JOUR
T1 - Some Principles on the use of Macro-Areas in Typological Comparison
AU - Hammarstrom, Harald
AU - Donohue, Mark
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - While the notion of the 'area' or 'Sprachbund' has a long history in linguistics, with geographically-defined regions frequently cited as a useful means to explain typological distributions, the problem of delimiting areas has not been well addressed. Lists of general-purpose, largely independent 'macro-areas' (typically continent size) have been proposed as a step to rule out contact as an explanation for various large-scale linguistic phenomena. This squib points out some problems in some of the currently widely-used predetermined areas, those found in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al., 2005). Instead, we propose a principled division of the world's landmasses into six macro-areas that arguably have better geographical independence properties.
AB - While the notion of the 'area' or 'Sprachbund' has a long history in linguistics, with geographically-defined regions frequently cited as a useful means to explain typological distributions, the problem of delimiting areas has not been well addressed. Lists of general-purpose, largely independent 'macro-areas' (typically continent size) have been proposed as a step to rule out contact as an explanation for various large-scale linguistic phenomena. This squib points out some problems in some of the currently widely-used predetermined areas, those found in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al., 2005). Instead, we propose a principled division of the world's landmasses into six macro-areas that arguably have better geographical independence properties.
U2 - 10.1163/22105832-00401001
DO - 10.1163/22105832-00401001
M3 - Article
SN - 2210-5824
VL - 4
SP - 167
EP - 187
JO - Language Dynamics and Change
JF - Language Dynamics and Change
IS - 1
ER -