Typologische Semantik

Typological semantics, in the broad definition adopted here, encompasses various empirical, conceptual, and theoretical approaches in linguistic research, whose most important commonality is an interest in cross-linguistic diversity in the semantics of natural languages. In the literature on syntactic and semantic research that focuses on linguistic diversity, these different approaches are often grouped under the headings "functional-typological" and "formal-theoretical," respectively. Semantic research of the functional-typological type is more closely associated with the term "semantic typology" (e.g., Evans 2010; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2015). For this reason, and because the concept of typology is sometimes viewed critically even by proponents of this research approach (e.g., Haspelmath 2014), we will use the term comparative semantics in the following , which is intended to summarize various research directions.