Typological Features Template
The following template allows you to create a short grammatical overview for your language. To work with such a templates might not only be useful for students of linguistics and fieldworkers working on so far little explored languages, but for linguists in general who are interested in less-described languages. The template covers phonology and morpho-syntax, but the idea is not that all fields must be filled. The template as as typological orientation and can be used with profit by everyone who had basic linguistic training. It is useful to start on a typological feature template for non-native speakers of the described language and fieldworkers since it gives to some extent an indication of the scope of phenomena that could (and perhaps need to be studied) but it is also useful as a tool for native speakers of a minority or less-studied language to describing their native languages in linguistic terms.
The template has a tabular form which already makes clear that the description intended will be rather limited in depth. The idea is to give a easy to grasp first overview over a language. Given the style and purpose of the template it is quite important that many referen Second, the glosses and translations for examples are given in Spanish. This practice is simply to make the difference between the language data and the translations clear. In a real grammar sketch the text, glosses and translations would probably all be in one language, while the language data would be in another, namely the language being described. This sample sketch has the awkward feature of employing the described language in the description itself.
Finally, this is very much a "work in progress." Please have patience, and just use this sketch as a general reference. It is not in any sense of the word "definitive."
Most grammatical descriptions will be more detailed than this sample sketch. Also, any grammatical description will include topics not dealt with in this sample, and may exclude some of the topics represented here. With this proviso in mind, it is also true that if the information that appears in this sample were available with respect to every language on earth, the field of descriptive linguistics would have accomplished a substantial portion of its task.
| Feature | Description |
| Phonological Features | The following fields describe the sound inventory of [your language] |
| Vowel inventory | |
| Vowel harmony | |
| Consonant inventory | |
| Tone | Suggestion: If your language is a tone language describe which tones are used; indicate whether your language uses lexical or grammatical tone. |
| Syllable Structure | |
| Morpho-syntactic Features | In the following fields you describe some of the morpho-syntactic parameters of [your language] |
| Basic properties | [Your language] could be an isolating language (not (or nearly not) making use of morphology, agglutinative, such as the Bantu languages of Africa, or synthetic, such as the Saami languages of Scandinavia, or even polysynthetic such as Greenlandic. In this field you classify [your language] according to these parameters if possible. |
| special features | Linguists have distinguished between head- and dependent-marking languages. Semitic languages are head marking languages; it is the head of the noun phrases that needs to have a special form when followed by a dependent noun; in the Germanic languages it is the head of the verb phrase that expresses person-number features of its subject. Grammatical dependencies on the other hand are in some of the Germanic languages expressed on the dependent noun phrases in form of case. [Your language] might be both, head- and dependent-marking, depending on the category of speech and or the type of feature expressed. This is what you can describe in this field. |
| Nominal Phrases | In the following fields we aim for a description of some of the basic morpho-syntactic properties of nominal constituents |
| syntactic structure | In this field you describe the linear order of elements in the noun phrase |
| nominal modification | In this field you indicate the basic types of nominal modifiers (adjectives, relative clauses, adpositions...) |
| nominal specification | In this field you list the nominal specifiers. Does [your language] have determiners, demonstratives (deixis), numerals, quantifiers. Are there affixes expressing reference, deixis. |
| possession | In this field you describe how possession is expressed (for example, syntactically or by use of prepositions, through juxtaposition or morphologically) Does [your language] feature possessive pronouns? |
| pronominal system | In this field you indicate if [your language] has free pronoun forms? Are pronouns marked for their grammatical function (object versus subject pronouns)? Does your language have bound pronouns (affixes) or pronoun doubling? Are reflexives expressed by pronouns? |
| Verbal Phrases | In the following fields serve for the description of some of the basic morpho-syntactic properties of verbal constituents |
| word order | In this field you indicate the basic word order of your language (SOV, SOV ...) |
| TAM | In this field you indicate which tense and/or aspects are morphologically or tonally marked; does [your language] make use of periphrastic tense or aspect constructions? |
| infinitival forms | In this field you indicate if [your language] makes use of an infinitive marker? How many infinitival forms does your language have? |
| verbal constructions | In this field you indicate if [your language] has ditransitive constructions, serial verb constructions or complex verb forms composed of several verbs. Does your language have so called light verbs, perhaps only used to indicate a certain tense or aspect? |
| Adpositions | In this field you indicate if [your language [makes use of prepositions or postpositions. Does your language have spatial nouns? Does your language use adpositions or particles to indicate grammatical relations between the verb and a nominal argument? |
| Complementation | In this field you describe complementation strategies. Does [your language] make use of complementizers? |
| Special Properties of [your language] | In this field you should mention properties of [your language] which do not fit into any of the other categories mentioned in this template |
| Short Bibliography |