Einfuhrung in die allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (review)

With this book, August Dauses has provided the field with the first short introduction to linguistic typology written in German. The intended audience, presumably either undergraduate students in the field or linguists wishing to inform themselves about the basics of typology, will benefit from its clear and precise language and compact length.

The first chapter consists of a short (eighteen-page) description of nine languages, including both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The descriptions are by no means complete, given their length, but they do touch on phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics. This information is used to illustrate the point that the grammatical categories students may have learned for German or foreign languages they have already studied are not generalizable to all languages. The remaining six chapters discuss primarily the Indo-European languages in light of the types of characteristics and categories outlined for the languages presented in Ch. 1. Comparisons are consistently made with non-Indo-European languages in order to avoid circular argumentation. Ch. 2 gives an overview of typology, Chs. 3–5 discuss general principles of the field, and Chs. 6 and 7 discuss how these principles are realized diachronically. Several disagreements within the field are also presented and discussed neutrally (though occasionally simplistically) throughout.

The main weakness of this book for classroom use is a complete lack of citation (it does not even contain a list of references). Without references to other works, the ideas presented here appear to be coming solely from D when it is clear to readers with a broader knowledge base about typology that he is drawing on a huge body of work done by many scholars for many decades. Though the choice to do this was likely made with the intention of making the text easier for the student to read, this problem might have been better solved by having a list of additional readings on each topic at the end of the book, aimed at the advanced student who might be ready for a more scholarly discussion of the issues presented here.

Typologists will find no new material here as this book is clearly aimed at an audience new to the field. Instructors of introductory courses in basic linguistics and typology in the German-speaking countries will, however, find this to be a welcome addition to their coursebooks.