Chapter outline

The concept of explanation is illustrated by explaining the structure of an English sentence. The three-step process is then applied to the explanation of crosslinguistically recurrent patterns. The postscript adds a few general comments about the study of language typology.

Introduction

Why are crosslinguistically recurrent patterns the way they are? In the preceding chapters, a few explanatory comments have already been made about some of them. The genesis of articles was explained by the general process of grammaticalization (Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1). The distribution of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses was accounted for by reference to the varying degrees of difficulty of relative clause constructions, which in turn stem from processing problems (Chapter 6, Section 6.3.2.2 and 6.4.1, Chapter 3, Section 3.2.1.1). The preference for homorganic consonant clusters was explained by auditory similarity among nasal consonants (Chapter 5, Section 5.2.1). The reason for the predominance of suffixing over prefixing was given by the history of affixation and by processing preferences (Chapter 4, Section 4.3). The predominance of the accusative and ergative alignment patterns over the other logical possibilities was explained by the need for clarity and economy (Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2.2). The crosslinguistic frequency of certain color terms was causally linked to cultural factors (Chapter 2, Section 2.5.2). And markedness was invoked for explaining a variety of patterns, such as asymmetries in body-part terms, kinship terminology, personal pronouns, number words, and antonymic adjectives (Chapter 2, Section 2.2–2.5), the distribution of zero forms (Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2.2), and some phonological patterns (Chapter 5, Section 5.3).