Some General Thoughts about Linguistic Typology and Dialogue Linguistics

Functional linguistic typology deals with universal patterns of cross-linguistic variation and looks at grammatical structures with their fixed meaning. Dialogue linguistics is based on the assumption that the concrete meaning of an utterance is indeterminate and depends on a number of factors within concrete speech situations. Given the rather divergent focuses of these two disciplines, one may wonder where there is any common ground and in what way they may profit from each other. The present paper is written from the perspective of a typologist and thus concentrates on the question of what typologists can learn from dialogue linguistics and how dialogue linguistics matters for typology.