What is it about?
The paper argues that we need to look at why the patterns are the way they are, not just compare forms without understanding why they are the way they are, e.g. what motivates certain clause patterns.
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Why is it important?
Most current typology is based on structuralism, which only focuses on the structures and not why the structures are the way they are. This leads to very problematic associations, such as saying Chinese and ENglish are both "SOV".
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This page is a summary of: Causation as a factor and goal in typological comparisons, Linguistic Typology, December 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/lingty-2017-0013.
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