Teamleader:
Curt Rice

Other Team members:
Knut Tarald Taraldsen
Michal Starke
Peter Svenonius
Ove Lorentz

Time span:
Project starts:
01.08.2003

Project ends:
31.12.2004

Brief description and goals:
The CASTL application proposes combining traditional research in linguistic theory with a more rigorous approach to typological studies, referred to in the application as selective global comparison. This type of study will supplement in-depth studies of individual languages – microcomparison – and will avoid the consequences of areal influence. This methodology comes out clearly in several places in the application. For example, the application opens with the following:

The aim of the Center is to research the nature of syntactic, morphological and phonological variation, in order to be able ultimately to determine along which grammatical parameters any two languages vary. To this end we will combine comparison of formal properties of small sets of related and unrelated languages with large-scale comparative studies and study of language change.

In a later section on selective global comparison, we describe the method as follows: Select a phenomenon known to be found in many, or all languages, but also known to exhibit variation across languages. Then select a small set of languages from different corners of the world, and investigate how this phenomenon is instantiated in these languages.

The appeal to selective global comparison is a significant part of the uniqueness of the CASTL application, and is a feature which the reviews praised. Our work over the past year is in the areas we indicated and is typological and comparative. However, we have not yet developed a strategy for pursuing selective global comparison, and the implementation of the project as we described it requires tackling this important methodological concern.

The project will explore the work that has been done using this methodology and will determine strategies for implementing the methodology in the other CASTL subprojects.

Activities planned for the project:
We plan to pursue the project in a local seminar group with the project participants, and may also bring in some guest lecturers.

Potential external collaborators:
This project could be enhanced with a few lectures by a guest who has worked on this methodology, with the total costs probably not exceeding 50.000kr.