Associated professor Alimova M. Kh

Structural typology

is one of the basic branches of linguistic typology which deals with the systematization and summarizing some general linguistic facts and establishing language universals.It is the major branch of linguisic typology and aims to identify universal features of languages

Structural typology consists of the following branches:

• Linguistic universals
• Etalon language
• Typological classification
• Typological theory

Linguistic universals

Under this term scholars understand certain phenomenon or regularity which is common to all languages of the world or to their absolute majority.

Linguistic universals are known long ago. In the ancient Greek grammars the grammatical system of this language was suggested as a model of categorization for all languages. That's why grammatical categories of case and gender used to be the main grammatical universal for all languages.

In the 17th century French scholars Arnauld A. and Lanselot C. wrote their Universal or Rational Grammar of the Port-Royal concerning many Germanic languages. They compared phonetic, grammatical and logical categories which used to be the basis for creating grammar of different languages. Port-Royal Grammar is of great importance in linguisics, because it was the first work concerning language universals.

The real language universals were produced in 1961 in the World Congress of Linguists by the group of American scholars such as John Greenberg, Lyle Jenkins and Charles Osgood.
The problem of universals is connected with the process of unification of language facts and with elaboration of specific methods of discovering linguistic universals. Some scholars think that creation of full list of linguistic universals is the main task of linguistic typology. They may be of different types: synchronic and diachronic, absolute and statistic (полные, неполные ), deductive - inductive, simple and complex, universals of languages and of speech. They may be also attached to the levels of language hierarchy.