ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the findings of formal approaches to language may help strengthen the very results of typology. In the ideal case, linguistic theory should simultaneously account for the in-depth properties of the phenomenon and for its range of variation across languages. It is only an accident of recent history that linguistic typology has been mostly developed by scholars working within functionalist approaches to language. To the extent that the results achieved within linguistic typology are solid results they constitute data that any approach, whether functionalist or formal, has to deal with. On one side, as observe, more and more researchers working within the generative approach have started to pay attention to some of the results of linguistic typology. Some, like Beninca and Poletto, have even come to propose, much in Greenberg's original spirit, cross-linguistic generalizations expressed in the form of implicational statements.
