The ListTyp Database
Authors: Francesca Masini, Simone Mattiola, Stefano Dei Rossi (Università di Bologna, WebSoup, 2021)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The paper describes the aim and structure of a new freely accessible resource – ListTyp: A typological database of listing patterns – with a focus on methodological aspects, encoded information and search functions.

Introduction
Typological investigation is challenging in its own right, let alone when it tackles ‘untraditional’ categories, namely (newly-established) categories that are not part of the stock of customary, long-established concepts for linguistic description, hence not usually described in grammars, at all or as such. ‘Lists’ belong to this class. Lists are traditionally associated with spoken language and interaction (see, among many others, benveniste_1990, jefferson_list-construction_1990, selting_lists_2007). However, a broader approach has been proposed by masini_list_2018, who define ‘lists’ as syntagmatic concatenations of two or more units of the same type (potentially paradigmatically connected) that fill one and the same slot within the larger construction they are part of. This abstract definition embraces linguistic phenomena normally ascribed to different levels (morphology, syntax, discourse). ‘Lists’, or ‘listing patterns’ (LPs), thus encompass syntactic and discourse structures like coordination (e.g. The system allows gas, electricity and water meters to be read [British National Corpus]), reformulation (e.g. They now had lifts, or rather elevators [British National Corpus]) or repetition (e.g. Some people are very very very touchy [British National Corpus]), but also lexical and morphological phenomena like irreversible binomials (e.g. alive and kicking), (co)-compounding (e.g. Chuvash sĕt-śu lit. milk-butter ‘dairy products’, walchli_co-compounds_2005, p. 138) and full reduplication (e.g. Sundanese hayan-hayan lit. RED-want ‘want very much’, moravcsik_reduplicative_1978, p. 321). Although these phenomena have their own specific properties (displaying different degrees of complexity, cohesion and conventionalization), lumping them together may unveil interesting (cross-linguistic) structural and functional tendencies and help bridging the gap between discourse and grammar. Attempting a typological study of LPs is not trivial and raises methodological issues. Data are available for some widely described LPs (e.g. coordination, reduplication, co-compounding), but other types of LPs are far from simple to find in descriptive grammars, which usually (and understandably) focus on long-established categories in phonetics, morphology and syntax (leaving often aside, e.g. syntax beyond the clause and discourse phenomena). The same applies to typological databases. Hence, doing typology in the ‘traditional’ way turns out to be hard, and a new integrated methodology for carving out the required data is needed <cit.>.

Conclusion
ListTyp is an ongoing project that welcomes collaborations for both data collection and analysis. We are currently processing data for completing Dataset A and enriching the other datasets. Updates will be published periodically. A full documentation will be available soon.