Language typology and processability theory

The focus of this chapter is on the typological plausability of Processability Theory (PT, Pienemann 1998). The chapter investigates how languages across typology encode grammatical relations (SUBJ and OBJ, etc) using different means of syntactic or morphological expressions, such as configurationality (i.e. syntactic phrase) and inflectional morphology. Lexical Functional Grammar's (LFG) view of language typology and expression of grammatical relations are explained using Bresnan (2001) and Nordlinger (1998). PT is able to interpret different means of morphosyntactic operations into its L2 developmental stages. This is possible by identifying which necessary procedural skills required for speech production are involved in a particular linguistic operation. LFG's "feature unification" is one of the key notions for PT stages. I will illustrate the relationship between language typology and PT stages, exemplifying a head-marking in English and two pro-drop languages (i.e. Italian and Arabic), and a dependent-marking in Japanese