Typology

Dynamics: Static, IDT, TDT
Determinability: Determinable, Indeterminable
Transciency: Transient, Intransient
Perspective: Personal, Impersonal
Access: Random, Controlled
Linking: Explicit, Conditional, None
User Function: Explorative, Configurative, Interprative, Textonic

Together, the 7 variables create 576 unique media positions.

A primary consideration of modern typology is the order of constituents in a sentence. Does the verb come at the beginning (as in Welsh, Arabic), in the middle (English, French), or at the end (Japanese, Turkish, Persian)? The verb-initial and verb-final types have the strongest correlations with other features of the sentence. Verb-medial languages like English may share characteristics of either extreme type. For example, questions are formed with a particle a before the verb in Welsh, but with a particle ka after the verb in Japanese.

Perhaps more striking, because less obviously related, verb position is strongly related to whether a language uses prepositions or postpositions. In Welsh they use prepositions: yng Nghaerdydd 'in Cardiff'; but in Japanese they use postpositions: Tookyoo ni 'in Tokyo'.

Adjectives follow nouns in Welsh and Arabic. Adjectives precede nouns in Turkish and Japanese.

A transitive sentence is one that has both a subject (S) and an object (O). In theory the normal order could be either SO or OS. In practice, it is always SO.

Combining this with verb position gives three possible orders: VSO, SVO, and SOV. To say a language is one of these says a significant amount about it.

No universal has ever been found that is truly universal: a minority of languages go against the pattern, but in some cases it is an extremely small minority. You have to go to ones like the Amazonian language Hixkaryana to find an OS order. (This is the neutral order: many languages can use OS for emphasis or variation.) Much of this study of typology and universals was first done by Joseph Greenberg in the 1960s.

Another criterion for classifying languages is how they mark their subject and object, apart from word-order. There are two main systems, very widely used, and three minor ones

• Accusative marking is by far the most familiar to European speakers, and is also used in Chinese and Japanese. Structurally, intransitive and transitive sentences pattern like this:
  the child-NOM sleeps
  the child-NOM hits the cat-ACC
• Ergative marking is also quite common. The pattern of marking is:
  the child-ABS sleeps
  the child-ERG hits the cat-ABS
• Active marking occurs in some North Caucasian languages, for example. Here the intransitive subject is marked depending on how active it is:
  the child-ACT hits the cat-INACT
  the child-ACT falls (deliberately)
  the child-INACT falls (accidentally)
• Direct marking occurs in some North American languages. It uses an animacy hierarchy. It is assumed children eat fruit, not vice versa, and children hit cats, not vice versa, and I see someone else, not vice versa. If the opposite relationship between participants occurs, it must be specially marked:
  the child sees the cat
  the cat-INDIR sees the child
• Philippine-style marking chooses one of several participants as the topic, and marks the verb to show which one it is. For example, 'the mother gives the rice to the baby in the cradle' could be any one of these four:
  gives-SUBJTOPIC mother-TOPIC rice-OBJ baby-RECIP cradle-LOC
  gives-OBJTOPIC mother-SUBJ rice-TOPIC baby-RECIP cradle-LOC
  gives-RECIPTOPIC mother-SUBJ rice-OBJ baby-TOPIC cradle-LOC
  gives-LOCTOPIC mother-SUBJ rice-OBJ baby-RECIP cradle-TOPIC

It was sometimes believed human languages followed a progression from the simplest isolating type to increasing levels of complexity, ending up of course at Latin. This idea was dealt rather a serious blow when Karlgren reconstructed ancient Chinese and discovered that four thousand years ago it had inflected pronouns: 'I/me', 'he/him'. (This detail has since been disputed, but the dethronement is not in doubt.)

In terms of archaeology or environmental science, typology is concerned with deducing the relative age of a subject (such as the evolution of pottery, jewellery or weapon styles in the former case, or similar rock structures and biological similarities in the latter) by comparing features with similar samples and inferring the general chronological point (i.e. without applying specific dates) at which the object was created or the event occurred. This is not usually a very accurate method, as anomalous objects are often found (foreign imports, for instance) - correlations drawn (in both disciplines) are usually substantiated with other dating methods before being considered reliable evidence.

See also:
- Stratigraphy
- Radio-carbon dating
- Dendrochronology
- Thermoluminescence
- Radiometric dating and
- Ice cores
- ...To name but a few.

In Biblical studies, typology refers to the process of drawing connections between an Old Testament figure and a New Testament figure (usually Jesus, but sometimes the Virgin Mary). The first figure is said to be a "type" of the second.

The terminology was borrowed from Romans 5:14, where Paul writes that the first man, Adam, was "a type of the one to come". "Type" in this context means model or example. The Greek word tupos originally referred to the mark made by a chisel, and it is the ancestor of English concepts like typewriter (a device that reproduces letters perfectly) and stereotype (a metal printing plate, and thus, by extension, a formula that can be applied repeatedly).

Paul does not really explain what he means when he says that Adam is a type or model of Christ, but later interpreters spent a lot of time fleshing out the connections. Adam is the "firstborn" of the old creation, they argued, while Jesus is the "firstborn" of the new creation. Adam was given access to the first paradise, but lost it, while Jesus provides access to a greater paradise for everyone. And so on.

Soon this reading strategy was applied to other major figures in the Christian Bible. Throughout the Middle Ages, typology was a very popular exegetical tool. Here are some examples to show you how it's done:

• Noah is a very popular type of Christ. Both figures are seen as the source of salvation -- but where Noah saved animals from a physical flood, Jesus saves people from spiritual destruction. Furthermore, both figures represent purification through water: a boat on floodwaters in the first case, and the waters of baptism in the second.
• Moses is occasionally seen as a type of Christ too. Matthew's gospel makes this parallel easy to draw by deliberately filling Jesus' childhood with echoes of that of Moses. Both Jesus and Moses were the target of a massacre as infants; both of them have a childhood connection to Egypt; and both of them eventually grow up to provide their people with a new Law.
• The letter to the Hebrews makes the case that Melchizedek is a type of Christ too. Melchizedek is an obscure figure who appears briefly in Genesis 14 and gets a passing mention in one psalm. We are told that he brought bread and wine with him when he blessed Abram; this image created an echo of the Eucharist in the minds of early Christian readers.
• Isaac is perhaps the most popular type of Christ of all, since he was taken to an altar to be sacrificed by his own father (Genesis 22). Isaac walked for three days, the same amount of time that Jesus spent in the tomb. He also carried his own wood, which many Christians see as prefiguring the moment when Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha.

In all these examples, the second figure is not just an echo of the first, but rather, a completion or a fulfillment of it. Jesus is seen as the new Moses, Mary is seen as the new Eve, and so forth. Needless to say, there is something intrinsically supersessionist about this hermeneutic, and many Jewish people resent the way that Christians treat ancient Jewish holy books as somehow "incomplete" and in desperate need of a sequel.

They have a point, of course: Jonah is worth reading, not because the main character "died" for three days "just like Jesus," but rather because it's a brilliant book with some profound (and often very funny) insights about human nature. If you're reading it only so that you can hunt for similarities with the Jesus narrative, then you've missed the point.

All that being said, however, a typological hermeneutic can invite the reader to think about both of the texts in question in fresh ways. Occasionally minor details that would have gone unnoticed in one text are brought into sharp relief when compared with the other. The Talmud works on the same principle: it, too, rubs two texts together in order to see what sparks fly. When it's done right, typology can be breathtakingly beautiful, creating a narrative that is much greater than the sum of its parts. When it's done badly, it can feel artificial and arbitrary.

Examples of typological readings can be found in the works of Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho 90-91), Irenaeus of Lyon (Against Heresies 4.25-26 and 2.25), Augustine of Hippo (On the Catechising of the Uninstructed 19.32), and elsewhere throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas provides guidelines for typological readings in the Summa Theologica 1.Q1.10.

Ty*pol"o*gy (?), n. [Type + -logy.]

1. Theol.

A discourse or treatise on types.

2. Theol.

The doctrine of types.

© Webster 1913.