"Somali in a typological-comparative perspective: from data to theory"

Working within a framework that assumes universal principles of grammar, the description of a language is only the first step of linguistic investigation. The morpho-syntactic and intonational properties of a language should, in fact, inspire the scholar’s reflection towards wider a consideration about the structure and functioning of languages in a comparative perspective, in order to reach a deeper understanding of the language-system as a unified whole. That’s why, once the description of data has reached a satisfactory level, linguistic investigation must proceed towards theory. The aim of this paper is to offer a short but, hopefully, significant overview of this analytical approach