Typological Profiling of English, Spanish, German and Slovak: A Corpus-Based Approach

Inspired by earlier work on typological profiling of English by Benedikt Szmrecsányi and Bernd Kortmann ([1], [2], [3]), this paper investigates the typological profiles of English, Spanish, German, and Slovak, applying Szmrecsányi and Kortmann’s methodology of calculating a SYNTHETICITY INDEX and an ANALYTICITY INDEX based on 1,000-word corpus samples. The results show that Szmrecsányi and Kortmann’s methodology is replicable, and confirm claims in the literature about degrees of analyticity and syntheticity of these languages. Instead of a simple analytic-synthetic continuum, Szmrecsányi and Kortmann’s “typological space” [3] is used to visualize results, showing that languages can be both synthetic and analytic to varying degrees.