The course is concerned with some of the classical results in linguistic typology as well as a number of central topics of current research. The focus is on aspects of syntax and morphology, e.g. word order, syntactic functions, grammatical polysemy, and relative clauses. We will examine correlations between structural parameters and genealogical groups as well as geographical areas and will consider the crosslinguistic distribution of linguistic features in light of current usage-based theories of information processing, analogy, and social interaction. Students will be introduced to recent work published in the wake of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) and will have the opportunity to work with reference grammars.