This book provides a state-of-the-art overview of work on linguistic typology, its history, its methodology, theoretical foundations and major achievements. It examines the directions of current research and shows how these reflect and inform work on linguistic theory.

Part 6: Language universals and their explanation 1. On explaining language universals 2. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science Part 7: Implicational relations and their modelling 3. Competing motivations and emergence: Explaining implicational hierarchies 4. Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries 5. Analyzing semantic maps: A multifactorial approach Part 8: Cross-linguistic categories and cross-linguistic comparability 6. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies 7. On categorization: Stick to the facts of the languages Part 9: Language sampling 8. A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals 9. A refined sampling procedure for genealogical control 10. Sampling for variety Part 10: Quantitative methods 11. Inferring universals from grammatical variation: multidimensional scaling for typological analysis 12. Adding typology to lexicostatistics: A combined approach to language classification 13. Distributional typology: Statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity