Cognitive Linguistics 2016; 27(4): 587–602

William Croft*
Typology and the future of Cognitive
Linguistics
DOI 10.1515/cog-2016-0056
Received May 20, 2016; revised August 12, 2016; accepted August 19, 2016

Abstract: The relationship between typology and Cognitive Linguistics was first
posed in the 1980s, in terms of the relationship between Greenbergian universals
and the knowledge of the individual speaker. An answer to this question
emerges from understanding the role of linguistic variation in language, from
occasions of language use to typological diversity. This in turn requires the
contribution of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary historical
linguistics as well as typology and Cognitive Linguistics. While Cognitive
Linguistics is part of this enterprise, a theory of language that integrates all of
these approaches is necessary.

Keywords: typology, Cognitive Linguistics, variation, verbalization, sociolinguistics

1 Introduction: What is the relationship between

typology and Cognitive Linguistics?
The connection between typology and Cognitive Linguistics can be dated at least
as far back as the 1980s, when generative grammarians debated typologists about
the nature of language universals. Then, as now, typologists emphasize that one
cannot understand language without looking at languages; Bernard Comrie
published an article titled “Linguistics is about languages” (Comrie 1978). The
central concept of typology, demonstrated by Joseph Greenberg in his seminal
1966 paper, was the implicational universal, for example, Universal 18:

When the descriptive [modifying] adjective precedes the noun, the demonstrative and the
numeral, with overwhelmingly more than chance frequency, do likewise. (Greenberg
1966: 86)

The insight behind implicational universals–an insight still not fully appreciated
even today, I think – is that few universals of language are of the form, “All

*Corresponding author: William Croft, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico,

Albuquerque, NM, USA, E-mail: wcroft@[Link]
588 William Croft

languages have X”. Unrestricted universals like these would mean that any
language one is familiar with, or any language that a child learns, exhibits X.
This is of course the basis of the generative approach to language universals:
properties that all languages have are the types of properties that can be
considered part of the human genetic endowment. Instead, many if not most
of the interesting universals of language are constraints on linguistic variation,
such as the implicational universal. And constraints on variation can only be
discovered by looking at languages – lots of languages, sampled from the full
range of genetic language families and geographical areas.
But as generative linguists rightly pointed out, from their point of view there
remains a major problem in typological theory. The problem is:

If Greenbergian typological universals are manifested only in cross-linguistic comparison,

do they have anything to do with the grammatical knowledge of an individual speaker?

This, at least, is how it was put to me, diplomatically, as a graduate student in

the 1980s. It is later stated more trenchantly by Newmeyer in his argument for
the irrelevance of implicational universals to generative grammar:

No child is exposed to cross-linguistic generalizations…Since typological generalizations

are not conceivably learned inductively by the child and are implausibly innate, one must
conclude that they are not part of knowledge of language at all (Newmeyer 2005: 117, 118)

The grammatical knowledge of an individual speaker is, of course, what gen-

erative grammarians are primarily interested in. But the grammatical knowledge
of an individual speaker is also the focus of Cognitive Linguistics. Both gen-
erative grammar and Cognitive Linguistics are focused on, or have been focused
on, linguistic cognition. One major difference between Cognitive Linguistics and
generative grammar is that generative grammar hypothesizes that the central
principles of language structure are peculiar to language, whereas Cognitive
Linguistics hypothesizes that all the principles of language structure are a
consequence of general cognitive processes, and the cognitive linguistic
enterprise involves endeavoring to confirm this hypothesis (Ungerer and
Schmid 1996; Croft and Cruse 2004; Evans and Green 2006).
Many typologists in the 1980s did not consider the question of the
grammatical knowledge of the individual speaker to be central to the typological
enterprise. (Greenberg was not among those; he once told me that typological
universals of language were valuable because they were a window onto the
human mind.) In fact, there was a common view that typology is ‘theory-
neutral’. This basically meant that typologists did not see a need to couch
universals and their explanation in terms of the formalisms popular at the
 Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics 589

time (Stassen 1985: 21–22), which were diverse and ever-changing – something
that is still true today. But it sometimes also represented a noncommittal view
on the theoretical implications not only of typological universals, but of the
methodology of crosslinguistic comparison and crosslinguistic generalization
that typologists developed. (Again, Greenberg was not among these; nor is
Stassen.)
Nevertheless, answering the question posed above provides the link between
typology and Cognitive Linguistics; and answering that question has been the
primary theoretical question that I have pursued as a typologist and a cognitive
linguist.

2 Variation and linguistic theory

2.1 Distributional variation

In order to make the connection between typology and Cognitive Linguistics, the
cross-linguistic patterns of linguistic diversity – Greenbergian universals – must
somehow emerge from the behavior of individual speakers in each speech
community. Since Greenbergian universals are patterns of diversity, that is, of
cross-linguistic variation, an obvious place to look for the connection is
language-internal variation. But there are several different kinds of language-
internal variation, and it is not obvious how to get from any of those kinds of
language-internal variation to cross-linguistic variation.
The first kind of language-internal variation is the type illustrated by
Greenberg’s Universal 18 above. Three language-internal constructions are
referred to by the universal: adjective-noun order, demonstrative-noun order
and numeral-noun order. Universal 18 constrains the variation in ordering
among these three constructions in any language. If Greenbergian universals
have anything to do with the grammatical knowledge of an individual speaker,
then somehow the implicational universal is part of what a speaker knows about
the grammar of their language, even if the implicational universal does not
uniquely determine the ordering in the language (for instance, if the adjective
follows the noun in the language).
Another classic typological universal, the NP Accessibility Hierarchy of Keenan
and Comrie (1977), exhibits another type of language-internal variation. The NP
Accessibility Hierarchy refers to the possibility of forming a relative clause with a
head referent filling a particular grammatical role in the relative clause (subject,
object, etc.). Keenan and Comrie propose the following hierarchy:
590 William Croft

(1) Subject < Direct < Indirect < Oblique < Genitive < Object of
Object Object Complement

Their Primary Relativization Constraint is as follows:

(i) A language must have a primary RC-forming strategy.
(ii) If a primary strategy in a given language can apply to a low position on
the AH, then it can apply to all higher positions.
(iii) A primary strategy may cut off at any point on the AH.

For example, Basque’s primary relativization strategy applies to subjects, direct

objects and indirect objects, while Toba Batak’s primary relativization strategy
applies to subjects only (Keenan and Comrie 1977: 72, 68–69).
Keenan and Comrie, and many typologists after them, used distributional
variation within a language, namely the distributional pattern of the
grammatical role of the head referent in the primary relativization strategy.
That is, the NP Accessibility Hierarchy constraints in (i)–(iii) are universals of
distributional variation both within and across languages.
In fact, many morphosyntactic universals are universals of combined lan-
guage-internal and cross-linguistic distributional variation. For example,
the universals of parts of speech described in Croft (1991, 2001) are of this
type. The universals are based on the generalization that object concept words
in the referring propositional act function (Searle 1969), property words in the
modification function, and action words in the predication function are
typologically unmarked. What this means is that in languages with more than
one construction for a particular function, the different constructions will define
a language-internal distribution of object, property and action concept words;
and the words will be distributed in the constructions such that for example,
action concept words will occur in the predication construction with the least
morphemes (e. g., no copula) and the most inflectional possibilities, and
property and/or object concept words will occur in predication constructions
with at least as many morphemes, e. g., with the addition of a copula, and the
same or fewer inflectional possibilities.
In fact, English requires a copula for both object and property predication,
and in addition an invariant article a for predication of countable object
concepts:

(2) a. Donna sings.

b. Donna is tall.
c. Donna is an Alabaman.
 Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics 591

The relative amount of coding of predication in these three constructions of

English replicates the hierarchy of structural coding of the predication of the
three different semantic classes of objects, properties and actions:

(3) Action < Property < Object (Croft 1991: 130; Stassen 1997: 127; Pustet 2003)

These examples demonstrate that distributional variation within a language

and grammatical variation across languages are governed by the same
universal principles (Croft 2001: 107). This is central to Radical Construction
Grammar. Grammatical categories are defined by the constructions in which
they occur. Grammatical categories are construction-specific as well as
language-specific – that is language-internal distributional variation. But the
principles, such as (3), governing language-internal distributional variation
also govern cross-linguistic distributional variation. In this way, the analyses
of typology and of (construction) grammars of individual languages can be
unified.
These universal principles can be represented for many typological patterns
using what has come to be called the semantic map model (Anderson 1982,
1986; Croft et al. 1987; Kemmer 1993; Haspelmath 1997a, 1997b, 2003; Stassen
1997; Kortmann 1997; van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). In the semantic map
model, distributional facts for grammatical elements that occur in particular
roles in grammatical constructions are represented as a grouping of the concepts
encoded by those grammatical elements. For example, the Accessibility
Hierarchy represents a linear arrangement of the participant role categories
represented by Subject, Direct Object, etc., as in (4):

(4) Subject < Direct < Indirect < Oblique < Genitive < Object of
Object Object Complement

The linear relationship among those conceptual categories reflects the constraints
on possible groupings of those categories in relative clause constructions within
and across languages.
Conceptual spaces can have a more complex structure, such as the con-
ceptual space for indefinite pronouns posited by Haspelmath (1997a). Here the
conceptual categories – different semantic types of indefinite pronouns – are
arranged in a more complex network based on whether a language-particular
form groups the meanings together.
The categories of indefinite pronoun meanings and the links between them
form the conceptual space, while the semantic maps for the indefinite pronouns
592 William Croft

of Finnish that indicate their meanings are illustrated with dashed/dotted lines;
the Finnish forms are given in italics.
The conceptual space in Figure 1 is modeled as a graph structure: the nodes
are the meanings and the edges (links) are the conceptual relations between the
meanings inferred from the patterns of grammatical distribution within and
across languages. That is, the conceptual space is represented as one of discrete
meanings (for a statistical algorithm to compute a discrete graph-structural
conceptual space, see Regier et al. 2013). It is also possible to model conceptual
space as a continuous space, and use statistical methods such as
multidimensional scaling (Levinson et al. 2003; Croft and Poole 2008; Rogers
2016 ; García Macías 2016) to construct Euclidean models of the conceptual
space.
Multidimensional scaling is particularly useful for large and complex data
sets such as the adpositional semantic data of Levinson et al. (2003). This data
was obtained by eliciting in nine languages descriptions of the 71 pictures of
IN/ON-type spatial relations designed by Melissa Bowerman and Eric Pederson
(published in Levinson and Wilkins 2006, Appendix 4). Croft and Poole
reanalyzed the Levinson et al. data; the analysis is described in greater detail
in Croft (2010a). The data demonstrate a high degree of variation in
categorization across the languages for this extremely fine-grained set of
semantic distinctions in this restricted semantic domain. However, it also
revealed a coherent conceptual space, ranging from degree of envelopment
of the figure by the ground at the IN end of the continuum to degree of a

Figure 1: Conceptual space for indefinite pronouns, with the semantic maps of the indefinite
pronouns of Finnish (Haspelmath 1997a: 293).
 Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics 593

relatively small figure in contact with and vertically supported by a relatively

flat ground at the ON end of the continuum, with varying types of support,
attachment and containment relations in between. In other words, what is
universal is not a set of conceptual categories, but salient semantic dimensions
in conceptual space that constrain – or perhaps better, guide – the
grammatical categories that are defined in particular languages.
The semantic map model allows us to distinguish what is language-universal
from what is language-specific. The structure of the conceptual space is language-
universal, while the grammatical categories defined by continuous or connected
regions in the conceptual space are language-specific. (There are other universal
constraints on grammatical categories than those implied by the structure of the
conceptual space; Croft 2001: 159–161, 2003: 140–142.) Some typologists
describe the semantic map model as simply a methodological convenience to
describe crosslinguistic generalizations (Anderson 1982: 228; Croft et al. 1987: 186;
Kemmer 1993: 201; van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 86). This stance is subject
to the same criticism of typology by generative grammarians presented in § 1. On
the other hand, Anderson, who is the immediate source of the modern semantic
map model, later called conceptual spaces “mental maps” (Anderson 1986);
Kortmann (1997: 177, 210) calls them cognitive maps, and I refer to the conceptual
space as a cognitive structure. The universal structure of the conceptual space
must be grounded in human cognition. The conceptual space and other
constraints on grammatical categories provide a link between human cognition
and typological variation and universals thereof. Likewise, the language-specific
knowledge captured by the semantic maps is also a cognitive structure of the
speaker, albeit not a universal one.

2.2 Variation in verbalization

We nevertheless still have not described how one gets from human cognition to
typological diversity. The starting point is yet another type of language-internal
variation, one that has not attracted much attention until recently. That is
variation in verbalization: variation that occurs at the level of individual usage
events. Most linguistic analysis starts from form and looks at meaning, for
example, the many analyses of polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics and, for that
matter, in the vast majority of reference grammars of indigenous languages. But
one can also start from meaning and look at what grammatical forms are used to
verbalize it.
The study of variation in verbalization is done most easily in experimental
situations in which one or more speakers verbalize a set of the same stimuli. In
594 William Croft

fact, cross-linguistic elicitation tasks such as the Bowerman-Pederson IN/ON

picture set referred to above, the World Color Survey (Kay et al. 2009) and the
cutting/breaking video clips (Majid and Bowerman 2007; Majid et al. 2008) also
document language-internal variation in verbalization (e. g., Kay et al. 2009: 55;
Levinson et al. 2003: 503; Majid et al. 2008: 239–240).
Wallace Chafe published two groundbreaking papers on verbalization at the
beginning of the cognitive linguistics enterprise (Chafe 1977a, 1977b). Chafe
produced one of the classic narrative verbalization stimuli, the Pear Film
(Chafe 1980); the Pear Film was later followed by the Frog Story, another
narrative verbalization stimulus (Berman and Slobin 1994).
Examining the Pear Stories produced by the twenty English speakers at
Berkeley that Chafe presents in his 1980 volume immediately reveals how
pervasive variation is. Every verbalization of every scene in the film is unique
in the entire corpus. Even when the verbalizations are broken down into their
component parts (lexical categories, argument structure, etc.), variation is
pervasive. This variation is due to the fundamental indeterminacy of language
use. In each utterance, the utterance meaning in context is unique and hence at
least slightly different from prior uses of the constructions replicated in the
utterance. Although a speaker’s choice is determined in part by how she
construes the experience to be verbalized, there are many ways to construe an
experience and the hearer does not know which one the speaker would choose.
Finally, the hearer cannot read the speaker’s mind; this is of course why one
person’s experience must be verbalized in order to share it with another
speaker. Yet speaker and hearer succeed because most of the time, perfect
precision – impossible to reach anyway – is not necessary for the interlocutors
to successfully carry out their joint actions that are coordinated by their
utterances (Clark 1996).
So variation is pervasive in language use. But the variation is constrained in
ways familiar to typologists (Croft 2010b). Two examples are given here. Second
mention of referents pertains to how referents are verbalized after they are
introduced in discourse. There are two common types of verbalizations in the
Pear Stories: as possessive pronoun or as a definite article (numbers preceding
each example indicate the speaker number and the number of the intonation
unit of the speaker’s verbalization):

(5) 1,16 and he [.3] dumps all his pears into the basket,
6,10 and dumps the pears into a basket.

In second mentions of seven different referents from the Pear Film, there was
systematic variation such that more animate referents that were less likely to be
 Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics 595

possessed were more likely to be verbalized with a definite article, and referents
that were less animate and more likely to be possessed were verbalized with the
possessive. Subtle semantic differences between the referents in the scenes
governed the relative frequency of the two variants (Croft 2010b: 19–21). For
example, the ladder is less likely to be owned by the pearpicker who is using it,
hence it is less likely to take the possessive pronoun; but the bicycle is more
likely to be owned by the boy riding it, hence it is more likely to take the
possessive pronoun. These subtle semantic differences are reflected in different
likelihoods of the use of the definite vs. the possessive pronoun.
These observations have far-reaching consequences for understanding the
nature of grammar. Grammar is not a mapping of discrete forms to discrete
meanings, or even sets of meanings. The mapping between form and meaning is
a probability distribution of forms across very specific points (very specific
meanings) in the conceptual space. Speakers make choices based on this prob-
ability distribution, giving rise to the most fundamental type of intralinguistic
variation: variation generated simply in the process of communication. This is
an exemplar-based model of grammatical knowledge, along the likes of exem-
plar models of phonological knowledge advocated by Bybee (1985, 2007, 2010)
and Pierrehumbert (2001, 2003). In some cases, the probability distribution
comes to be more categorical, and the result is the language-internal distribu-
tional variation that was discussed above.
This essential, fundamental process generating linguistic variation is the
ultimate source of grammatical change, as argued in Croft (2010b). For example,
variation in verbalization of so-called “light verbs” such as put correlates closely
with the more contentful verbs that are the historical sources of the light verbs.
The verb put was used by at least one speaker in Chafe’s Pear Film narratives in
five scenes, and in four of the five scenes, there was variation in verbalization,
with other speakers using other verbs; see Table 1.

Table 1: Variation in verbalization of PUT events in the Pear Stories (based on Croft 2010b: 15,
Table 2).

Scene put Other Other verbs used Object being Instrument

verb PUT

C  – singular hand
A   drop, stuff distributive hand
E   load, throw, toss, pour plural hand
A   empty, dump, tumble, drop, place, plural apron
deposit
G   deposit, dump, empty, unload plural apron
596 William Croft

As with second mentions, there are subtle semantic differences between the
scenes which are reflected in the frequency distribution of forms, even with the
low overall number of instances in the data. What might be called prototypical
PUT, with a singular object and the agent’s hand as the instrument, is verbalized
with put by all the speakers. Moving away from the prototype, to scenes with
distributive and plural objects and an instrument other than the agent’s hand,
leads to increasing frequency of verbalization with other verbs.
When the different verbs used in the scenes in the Pear Stories are compared
to the etymological sources of the verbs in Indo-European (Buck 1949), we see
that basically the same verbs are found; see Table 2.
These and many other examples described in Croft (2010b) demonstrate that
grammatical change is largely gradual change in the probability distributions of
the form-meaning mapping. As some variants increase in frequency and others
decrease to zero, they come to look like the “discrete” language changes that are
presented in historical linguistics textbooks.

Table 2: Alternative verbs for PUT events in the Pear Stories and etymological sources of
Indo-European PUT verbs (adapted from Croft 2010b: 18, Table 5).

Pear Indo-European PUT verb Source/related verb in older language

Stories

throw, toss Modern Greek vazo Ancient Greek bállō ‘throw’, occasionally
‘put’
French mettre, Italian mettere, etc. Latin mittere ‘let go, throw’, Late Latin ‘put’
Modern Irish cuirim Old Irish cuirim ‘throw, put’
stuff English put Old English potian ‘thrust, push’
place Dutch plaatsen Dutch plaats ‘place [n.]’

2.3 Socially-governed variation, language change

and typology

This “discrete” language change is misleading. Language is always variable;

variation is one of the fundamental properties of language. But there is still a
missing step (actually, two missing steps) between the fundamental variation
just described and the typological diversity we observe in the languages of the
world. The (first) missing step is socially-governed variation: the situation when
two or more variants acquire social valuation. This is the realm of
sociolinguistics, a theoretical approach to language that emerged around the
same time as generative grammar (Weinreich et al. 1968) but is unfortunately
 Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics 597

often ignored by functionalists and cognitive linguists. Sociolinguistics itself is

somewhat isolated from other theoretical approaches. Variationist sociolinguis-
tics focuses on the social factors determining the propagation of variants
through a speech community (Labov 2001; Milroy 1992; Trudgill 1983, 2002).
Sociolinguistics generally takes for granted the existence of language-internal
variation but does not offer a mechanism by which the variation is generated in
the first place.
The usage-driven variation described above can be integrated with socially-
driven variation in an evolutionary model of language use, variation and change
(Croft 2000). Language use is the replication of sounds, words and
constructions. As argued above, language use generates variation.
Evolutionary models are models of change by replication. Evolutionary models
are also two-step models: generation of variation, and selection of variants. I
hypothesized that the first step, generation of variation, is driven by functional
factors, namely meaning and discourse, as in the subtle semantically-driven
variation in frequency described above; and selection is driven by social factors,
most importantly the differential social weighting of linguistic variants
(Blythe and Croft 2012).
We can now describe how typological diversity is connected to a speaker’s
knowledge about her language. Speakers generate variation in language use; we
can call this FIRST-ORDER VARIATION (Croft 2010b: 3). A speaker’s knowledge about
her language is usage-based: it is a probability distribution of forms over
meanings in the conceptual space, inferred from past usage events and con-
stantly changing as forms are replicated to verbalize new experiences in new
usage events. These probabilities can change, both as a speaker’s experience
changes and also because speakers also observe frequencies of variants used by
particular social groups in her speech community, and come to associate certain
variants with their social valuation of those groups. This gives rise to SECOND-
ORDER VARIATION. Second-order variation is socially-governed variation; it assigns
first-order variants differential social values. At this point, frequencies of
variants are now also governed by social factors. This last association can lead
to propagation of more highly valued variants at the expense of less highly
valued variants. Finally, as speech communities diverge and ultimately split,
patterns of propagation of the original speech community will become
independent and possibly lead to different outcomes. As the descendant speech
communities become socially autonomous units, different variants end up
being propagated. The result is the typological diversity of languages, that is,
THIRD-ORDER VARIATION.
This typological diversity has its ultimate origins in first-order variation. The
functional factors that drive first-order variation survive in third-order variation
598 William Croft

because the social factors that drive second-order variation, and ultimately
selection of a linguistic variant, are independent of the verbalization process.
The output of selection in a large enough language sample will therefore reflect
the frequency distribution of the verbalization process. Hence, patterns of
typological diversity will reflect the factors that determine verbalization.

3 Conclusion: Whither Cognitive Linguistics?

Cognitive Linguistics provides an important part of the picture sketched in the
preceding section. Cognitive Linguistics provides a model of semantics, and
support for that model in psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and corpus research.
The usage-based wing of Cognitive Linguistics provides the basis for the model
of how first-order variation is generated in language use and how language use
ends up as knowledge of language structure by a speaker.
But this is not the entire picture. Discourse theories (one variant of which is
called ‘functionalism’ in a narrow sense of that term) and theories of social
cognition fill in the piece of language use that is social interaction – an essential
if not the most important piece of language use. Sociolinguistics, at least
variationist sociolinguistics, plugs in second-order variation: language in its
social function. And typology, and the documentary linguistics without which
typology could not exist, gives us the understanding of third-order variation:
language diversity and language universals.
Cognitive Linguistics, as it is usually understood, is about language as a
cognitive process, specifically a combination of general cognitive processes
rather than a unique, encapsulated, genetically fixed cognitive ability. But
language is more than a cognitive process. It is also a social-interactional
process, in several senses of that term, including social cognition (joint
attention, common ground, theory of mind, cooperation, etc.; Clark 1996;
Tomasello 1995, 1999, 2008, 2009, 2014; Tomasello et al. 2012), face-to-face
interaction, and an emblem of social groups and social identities. And it is a
historical, evolutionary process, whose ultimate outcome is typological diversity
and constraints on that diversity. A number of cognitive linguists, including
Geeraerts (2016), Langacker (2016), Schmid (2016), Sinha (2009), and Croft
(2009), have argued that Cognitive Linguistics needs to take social cognition
into consideration. But can Cognitive Linguistics expand its scope to include
discourse-functional linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, evolutionary lin-
guistics, typology and documentary linguistics? Should it? Would it really be
Cognitive Linguistics any more?
 Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics 599

I think that the answer to all of these questions is “no”. Cognitive Linguistics
does what it does, in particular empirically-supported conceptual semantics and
usage-based linguistics, including most of construction grammar in the latter.
But Cognitive Linguistics must be integrated into, or integrate itself into, a
larger, comprehensive theory of language. The same is true of course for dis-
course-functional linguistics, sociolinguistics and typology. All of these
approaches tend to work in isolation from each other, i. e., in isolation from
other parts of language, sharing primarily the rejection of the Chomskyan
paradigm. But it is hard to make the case that such a disjointed effort is an
alternative to the Chomskyan paradigm. The narrow focus of the latter gives it
an appearance of unity or at least conformity to a fixed set of core principles.
The Chomskyan paradigm does not embrace all of the many dimensions of
language. On the other hand, it is not easy to meld all the dimensions of
language into an alternative approach. The term ’functionalism’ is often used
in a broad sense to describe that alternative approach, but there is no widely
accepted theory encompassing all of these dimensions. I personally consider the
evolutionary framework to be the best candidate for an integrated theory of
language in all of its dimensions (Croft 2000, 2011a, 2011b). In whatever way, the
Balkanization of non-Chomskyan linguistics must end if we are to make greater
progress in understanding the nature of language during the twenty-first
century.

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