The word typology literally means the study of types. Beyond this simple definition, the term has at least four distinct uses in the fields listed below:
Typology is the classification of things according to their characteristics, and has seen widespread application in Archaeology. Typology may also be used to denote the results of a classification exercise, for example, a classification of pottery vessel forms such as the Dragendorff typology of RomanSamian ware.
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries archaeological typologies were usually constructed using a combination of empirical observation and intuition. Since the 1960s mathematical methods (including Cluster analysis, Principal components analysis, and Factor analysis) have been used. During the 1990s archaeologists began to use phylogenetic methods borrowed from Cladistics.
Typological classification of languages contrasts with the more familiar genetic classification into families that share an ancestor language (see historical linguistics).
A genetic class is a language family, while a typological class is a language type.
Some languages that are inflected are difficult to classify in the SVO typological system, because virtually any ordering of verb, object, and subject is possible and correct.
From a typological point of view, no language is known which has voiced aspirates unless it also has voiceless aspirates.
Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov found a possible solution to the problem by postulating that the voiced unaspirated series was actually ejective (or glottalized), while the voiced aspirated series was just plain voiced.
However, if the system was typologically stable, as proposed, then you would (a) expect to see it preserved in some of the daughter languages, which is not the case; (b) not expect to see a multiplicity of modifications in the daughter languages, as is in fact the case.
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