Over the last two decades, our picture of worldwide grammatical diversity and uniformity has become much richer. While language universals research was initiated by Greenberg (ed.) 1963 and Greenberg (ed.) 1978, and the comparative perspective has been adopted by generative syntacticians as well (e.g. Roberts 1996; Newmeyer 2008), it was only with the publication of the World atlas of language structures (WALS, in book format 2005, online 2008/2013) that worldwide grammatical diversity has been readily accessible to a larger audience.

Now there is a new resource for typological databases: CrossGram, published at MPI-EVA, within the CLLD framework developed by Robert Forkel. How does it relate to earlier efforts of a similar kind?

A fair number of other database projects have been carried out by different groups of scholars (e.g. Everaert et al. 2009, Ivani & Bickel 2023), and quite a few are available online for browsing (and often for downloading and re-use): salient examples are StressTyp2 (a database about stress systems), Phoible (a database about segment inventories), eWAVE (a database of morphosyntactic features of varieties of English), SSWL (a database of syntactic structures of the world’s languages), the Hunter-Gatherer Language database, the Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics, as well as the various databases of the Surrey Morphology Group. And most recently, another very big database was published by MPI-EVA linguists (Grambank, coordinated by Hedvig Skirgård, Harald Hammarström, and Russell Gray). All these have their own web application.

But there are also many other grammatical database projects that are smaller in scope and do not have the resources of creating a separate web app. Often they were created for specific research papers and are published exclusively in tables in an appendix or in a supplement, sometimes in PDF form so that they cannot easily be extracted and re-used. It is for these kinds of smaller-scale databases that CrossGram was created.

For example, Handschuh (2019) is a paper on the nominal classification features of personal names, on the basis of a worldwide 51-language sample. The data were published as a two-page data appendix (partially reproduced here),

and the paper also contains a small world map showing the distribution of one of the four language parameters. In the CrossGram version, there are several additional features: There are world maps of all four parameters, the maps are interactive in the usual way (zoomable, clickable, manipulable icon size), the language tables include references to Glottocodes (and links to Glottolog) and contain a sortable family column, plus a table with clickable reference names.

Another example is Reesink (2013), a survey of ditransitive ‘give’ constructions in 72 Papuan languages, with an appendix that is again reproduced here partially. Reesink’s paper contains no maps, and the language parameters are not easy to grasp (also because of the abbreviations). In the CrossGram version, the language parameters are slightly simplified, and they can all be shown on interactive maps, like the one reproduced here.

In some cross-linguistic research papers, there are appendixes with examples, as in Guillaume Jacques’s paper on estimative constructions (the appendix is a 39-page PDF supplement). The corresponding CrossGram contribution thus has an examples table, with each example sourced and clickable for a four-line parallel view (“more”).

At the moment (in November 2024), CrossGram has 11 contributions, from various periods (beginning with Nichols’s data from her classic 1992 book), and with various sizes. Some contributions show just a few dozen languages, with others have hundreds (895 languages in Sinnemäki & Ahola’s,  1077 in Dryer’s contribution, and 2146 in Barlow’s (on Austronesian and Papuan numeral systems). Most have global scope, but some contain data about a particular area (Barlow on Papunesia, Reesink on New Guinea), and one is restricted to typological data about languages from one family (Auderset on Indo-European relativizers).

Each contribution minimally has one language parameter, but there may also be constructions and construction parameters in a CrossGram database.

Most spectacularly, Malchukov & Haspelmath’s database on ditransitive constructions contains 592 constructions, many of which are described in some detail in prose. They can be accessed by going to the “Constructions” tab. (The languages tab shows that the database has 425 languages.)

The database contains information on many of these constructions for up to 13 construction parameters, i.e. properties that the constructions have (see the construction parameters tab). For construction parameters, there is no map showing the distribution, because a language may have several constructions of the same type. However, each construction parameter is clickable, yielding an informative table, often with extra comments and linked examples (see, e.g., the table for the construction parameter “flagging of recipient”).

Each example sentence is linked to a contribution and a language (plus a reference, usually with page number), and many examples are linked both to a construction and to a construction parameter. The following is an example of a ditransitive construction in Kham.

The main page has seven tabs, showing all the languages represented in the database collection (currently 5329), all the language parameters (currently 99), all the constructions (currently 742), and all the examples (currently 2779). There are also over 5000 sources, but these have not been deduplicated yet.

In addition, there is a tab “Topics”, but this will be the topic of a later blogpost.

CrossGram is open to further submissions! A preliminary version of the submission description is here. It is hoped that it will give good access to a lot of cross-linguistic data that are currently hidden in appendixes and supplements.

References

Everaert, Martin & Musgrave, Simon & Dimitriadis, Alexis (eds.). 2009. The use of databases in cross-linguistic studies. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.). 1963. Universals of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Greenberg, Joseph H (ed.). 1978. Universals of human language (four volumes). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Handschuh, Corinna. 2019. The classification of names. STUF – Language Typology and Universals 72(4). 539–572. (doi:10.1515/stuf-2019-0021)

Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.). 2005. The world atlas of language structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ivani, Jessica K. & Bickel, Balthasar. 2023. Databases for comparative syntactic research. arXiv. (doi:10.48550/arXiv.2310.11187) (http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11187) (Accessed November 2, 2024.)

Jacques, Guillaume. 2023. Estimative constructions in cross-linguistic perspective. Linguistic Typology 27(1). 157–194. (doi:10.1515/lingty-2021-0054)

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2008. Universals in syntax. The Linguistic Review 25(1–2). 35–82. (doi:10.1515/TLIR.2008.002)

Reesink, Ger. 2013. Expressing the GIVE event in Papuan languages: A preliminary survey. Linguistic Typology 17(2). 217–266. (doi:10.1515/lity-2013-0010)

Roberts, Ian. 1996. Comparative syntax. London: Edward Arnold.

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