Raising cross-linguistic dust: What can contrastive linguistics do for typology?
Raising cross-linguistic dust: What can contrastive linguistics do for typology?

Summary/Abstract: The paper is concerned with the relationship between typology and contrastive linguistics. Some less obvious benefits that this close encounter may have for typology are demonstrated by taking a closer look at so-called raising constructions. The usefulness of contrastive methodology in the verification or falsification of putative language universals and parameter-setting is exemplified on an earlier typological attempt by Eckman (1977) to generalize raising facts by means of an implicational scale. It is argued that the scale is untenable the way it was originally formulated. It has also been shown that a corpus-based bidirectional approach may make the picture that typology presents less neat and orderly but more realistic. Some issues bound to be uncovered by a contrastive approach, such as the importance of finiteness-non-finitness cline and productivity of syntactic constructions, together with attendant morphological and semantic factors such as morphological coding system, word order, predicate-argument structure, etc., are claimed to be essential ingredients of an alternative way of looking at the cross-linguistic differences and similarities in raising potential.

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