linguistic categories, language description and typology - an overview

in this paper we offer a critical discussion of the rationale for the volume. After a shirt introduction (section 1), an outline of the long standing opposition between language particular description and universal grammar is provided (section 2). This opposition indeed represents the substrate on which the 'comparative concept debate' is based: a summary of the debate, both in the form it had in the LINGTYP mailing list (January/February 2016) and in the subsequent monographic issue of Linguistic Typology 2016 is offered in section 3 and section 4. Some critical considerations on the debate and on its relation with the various branches of linguistics are presented in section 5. An overview of the paper included in the volume closes this introduction.