[4] Speculations of the existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school.
For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and the three 'holy languages', Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic.
Nicolas Beauzée's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish, Irish, Welsh, Basque, Quechua, and Chinese.
[5] The conquest and conversion of the world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages.
Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language.
Speakers included Roman Jakobson, Charles F. Hockett, and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages.
[6] During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International, which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue, as an online database.
Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for the description and comparison of languages.
One set of types reflects the basic order of subject, verb, and direct object in sentences: These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply.
For instance, German (Ich habe einen Fuchs im Wald gesehen - *"I have a fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch (Hans vermoedde dat Jan Marie zag leren zwemmen - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh (Mae'r gwirio sillafu wedi'i gwblhau - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete").
In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of the auxiliary.
Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts.
In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from the default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context.
On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself).
[14] Universalist explanations include a model by Russell Tomlin (1986) based on three functional principles: (i) animate before inanimate; (ii) theme before comment; and (iii) verb-object bonding.
It is a well-documented typological feature that languages with a dominant OV order (object before verb), Japanese for example, tend to have postpositions.
The most widely held such explanation is John A. Hawkins' parsing efficiency theory, which argues that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms.
Typological tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently, and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty.
It is suggested more recently that the left-right orientation is limited to role-marking connectives (adpositions and subordinators), stemming directly from the semantic mapping of the sentence.
Since the true correlation pairs in the above table either involve such a connective or, arguably, follow from the canonical order, orientation predicts them without making problematic claims.
Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in the structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages.