Presentation

The “Language Description, Typology and Variation” research team is founded on the idea that any study of language conscious of taking into account the diversity of languages requires highly reliable typological data, which in turn depends on the variety and the quality of available language descriptions. With the predicted increase in the rate of language extinction, a real danger is that in decades to come a large number of languages will have disappeared without ever having been described in any detail, thus losing forever their valuable contribution to our understanding of the range of possible forms that human languages can take. We consider typology and language description therefore as two closely intertwined domains, and that all new language descriptions can contribute to our knowledge of language diversity, but that conversely no language description is possible without a certain number of hypotheses about the structure of the object to be described. Furthermore, the group follows the general approach of the Dynamique Du Language laboratory, in that particular attention is given to the diachronic evolution of languages, to the phenomenon of grammaticalization, to the gradual loss and attrition of endangered languages, and to the sociolinguistic aspects of endangered languages.

Main research topics

• Description of under- or undescribed languages
• Description of spatial expressions
• Description of noun classification systems
• Description of events and participants
• Description and variation of phonological systems
• Language and dialect identification

Languages studied by the team members