Neo-Firthian theories - which include Systemic Functional Linguistics
and its congeners - have, unlike other functionally oriented theories,
engaged minimally with linguistic typology and have made little impact
on the wider discipline. This book offers a programmatic and
Neo-Firthian informed typological investigation that points to potential
mutual enrichments of linguistic typology and Neo-Firthian theories.
On the one hand, this book identifies the inadequacies of the dominant
'atheoretical' approaches to linguistic typology, and shows how these
can be circumvented through a firm foundation in a Neo-Firthian
theoretical framework. On the other hand, it contends that Neo-Firthian
approaches must take typology seriously as a criterion of theoretical
adequacy, and be able to account for the full range of grammatical
phenomena and their variation across languages, as well as those
features that are universal. Case studies illustrate this argument
through a selection of grammatical phenomena - in particular,
grammatical relations, the noun phrase, complex sentence constructions,
optional case marking and grammatical classification.
This book will be of interest to typologists, as well as to linguists
working within Systemic Functional Linguistics and other functional
theories.