Acknowledgments
First I would like to thank Frans Plank, not just for giving me this chance to express my personal views on where linguistic typology stands at this historical moment, but also for enriching my understanding of the field through discussions over many years. For institutional and financial support of my research I thank the Australian National University, the Universität zu Köln, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation (whose award of an Anneliese Maier-Forschungspreis partly supported my time working on these problems), and the Australian Research Council (projects: The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language). For discussions or references that helped me clarify the points discussed here, I thank Dan Dediu, Mark Ellison, Simon Greenhill, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Steve Levinson, Miriam Meyerhoff, Jim Stanford, Peter Trudgill, and Catherine Travis, as well as other members of the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity reading group, the NWAV-AP3 conference in Chiayi, Taiwan (April 2016), and the audiences of talks I gave partly touching on these topics at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (July 2015) and the Typoling Summer School, Porquerolles, France (September 2016).
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