Joseph Greenberg

Joseph Greenberg was an American linguist known for founding the modern study of language typology and linguistic universals, the systematic comparison of grammatical patterns across the world's languages to identify features that recur across unrelated language families. His 1963 paper on universals of grammar, based on a sample of thirty languages, proposed a widely cited set of implicational universals, generalizations of the form that if a language has one grammatical feature it tends also to have another, such as patterns relating word order to the placement of adjectives and prepositions. Greenberg also proposed influential classifications of the languages of Africa, dividing them into four major families including Niger-Congo and Afroasiatic, a scheme that remains broadly accepted and reshaped the field of African linguistics. His later attempts to group the languages of the Americas and of Eurasia into broader macro-families, Amerind and Eurasiatic, were considerably more controversial and were not widely accepted by other historical linguists, but his typological method for comparing grammatical universals across languages remains a standard tool of the field.