I am currently teaching a course on Linguistic Typology and thought I would share my list of introductory readings and resources with you. As an experimental linguist and language acquisition researcher with a cross-linguistic approach to psycholinguistics, I find that typological issues keep coming up in my projects. For instance, we needed those resources when we looked at
- potential effects of typological properties on non-linguistic cognition
- learnability issues that children face when they acquire different systems of case marking
- the storage and computation of morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon, which we investigated for a Bantu language, published in a special journal issue about cross-linguistic psycholinguistics ,
- the requirements for a cross-linguistic multi-purpose tool for the creation of elicitation games and experiments for child language research
Introductions to Typology
Bisang, W. (2001). Aspects of typology and universals. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Christiansen, M. H., Collins, C., & Edelman, S. (2009). Language universals. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Comrie, B. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology: Syntax and morphology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Croft, W. (2009). Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cysouw, M. (2005). Quantitative methods in typology. In G. Altman, R. Köhler, & R. Piotrowski (eds). Quantitative linguistics: an international handbook (pp. 554-578). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Givón, T. (1984/91). Syntax. A Functional-Typological Introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Greenberg, J.H. (1974). Language typology: A historical and analytic overview. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Greenberg, J.H., et al. (eds.) (1978). Universals of Human Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hickey, R. (eds.) (2017). The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyovin, A.V. (1997). An introduction to the languages of the world. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mallinson, G. & Blake, B.J. (1981). Language typology: Cross-linguistic studies in syntax. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Nichols, J. (2007). What, if anything, is typology? Linguistic Typology, 11: 231–238.
Nichols, J. (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Plank, F. (ed.) (1986). Typology. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Shibatani, M. & Bynon, T. (eds.) (1995). Approaches to language typology. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
Shopen, T. (ed.) (1985). Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slobin, D. I. (1997). The universal, the typological, and the particular in acquisition. In Dan I. Slobin (ed.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol. 5: Expanding the Contexts (p.1-39). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Song, J. (2013). The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology: Morphology and syntax. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Song, J. (2014). Linguistic typology: Morphology and syntax. London: Routledge.
Velupillai, V. (2012). An introduction to linguistic typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Whaley, L.J. (1997). Introduction to typology: The unity and diversity of language. Newbury Park: Sage.
Journals
- Linguistic Typology (published by the Association for Linguistic Typology http://www.linguistic-typology.org): https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2016.20.issue-1/lingty-2016-0004/lingty-2016-0004.xml
- STUF – Language Typology and Universals (Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung) https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/stuf
Databases and other Resources
The Association for Linguistic Typology has a list of databases and other resources for typological research. The Glottolog database of languages and language families also provides useful resources.
I hope you find these resources and the other resources on our ExperimentalFieldLinguistics website useful. I would greatly appreciate any further suggestions for this list and the resource lists on my sites for child-directed speech or language games.
Sonja
P.S. I have moved to Cologne now and I am currently teaching at the University of Cologne and working on my language games, trying to make them “greener” with a sustainable permaculture approach that should work well in fieldwork situations.

Sustainable Digital and Social Practices
I suggest (sorry for the obvious bias):
1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00556
2. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lnc3.12201/abstract
3. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lnc3.12207/abstract
4. http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~vasishth/statistics/BayesLMMs.html